Went out to
the country this past weekend and took this picture of the yearling doe that was
found abandoned when she was a fawn. The mother doe was either killed by coyotes
or the mountain lions. Weak and ant bitten she was rescued by the wife of the
ranch hand. The dog next to her just had a litter of pups so the deer started to
nurse with the puppies. Well this little fawn survived and now runs, eats and
sleeps with the dogs ! It is funny watching her run along the side of the truck
with the dogs and wishing she could bark like them too.
Message sent by my friend Jerry Hernandez at Trinity University
[GHernan1@Trinity.edu]

Jensen Comment
It's written in yearling-doe hormones that someday she'll lose her heart to a
young buck like the one in the picture below forwarded by Paula. There's little
doubt what this horny guy will be looking for in next autumn's rut if he does
not first become a hood ornament or venison sausage.

On May 14, 2006 I retired from Trinity University after a long
and wonderful career as an accounting professor in four universities. I was
generously granted "Emeritus" status by the Trustees of Trinity University. My
wife and I now live in a cottage in the White Mountains of New Hampshire ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/NHcottage.htm

Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

Update on Free Open Sharing of Knowledge by
Colleges and Universities
"Professors on YouTube, Take 2," by Jeffrey R. Young , Chronicle of
Higher Education, January 29, 2008 ---
Click Here

Since writing about how
professors are finding celebrity on YouTube, several people
wrote in to point us to other efforts to offer lecture videos
online. So here are a couple of more, with some updates on what
they are up to:

* Research Channel:
This non-profit consortium of colleges and universities
broadcasts video of campus lectures and presentations in a
variety of formats. Its largest reach comes from its satellite
and cable-TV channel, which reaches more than 30-million homes
in the U.S. But the group has long had
a Web presence as well, and its leaders say the online
audience is growing rapidly. Amy Philipson, executive director
of Research Channel, says to look for the channel to offer its
videos on YouTube soon. And she says they've recently set up a
page on iTunesU, the educational section of Apple's iTunes
Store.

* UChannel:
Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs runs this
Web-video network that pulls together audio and video
recordings of campus talks. The effort
started back in 2005. Donna M. Liu, director for strategic
initiatives for Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, says that
UChannel was on YouTube long before the University of
California at Berkeley set up its channel there. And the group
even offers a
Facebook application that pops lecture videos into your
online social profile.

* DoFlick: On a
much, much smaller scale, recent graduates of the University of
Maryland at College Park set up
this site featuring instructional videos about science and
engineering. One of the founders, Luis Corzo, says the site is
getting about 5,000 to 10,000 visits per month. One of the stars
of the site so far is Richard E. Berg, a professor of practice
at College Park who
produces videos of physics demonstrations.

Finally, I produced a
short video report with footage from some of lectures
featured in my previous article. What's your favorite lecture
video online?

Gabriela Montero is a classical pianist who loves to
improvise. At her concerts, audience members sing her a tune and she immediately
creates a multi-layered improvisation. Montero likes to visit the NPR studio to
try something similar, called Sing It and Wing It. With Performance Today host
Fred Child, Montero takes phone calls from listeners. They sing her a tune and
tell her the story behind it. Montero creates a new, on-the-spot improvisation
--- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18185186

Tom Robinson
(retired accounting professor from the University of Alaska and a wonderful
friend and fisherman) forwarded this magnificent PowerPoint show.
Alaskan
Railroad
(Great music and photographs) ---
Click Here

Forwarded by a
former B-29 pilot and friend named Col. Bob Booth
OH-58 Kiowa helicopter that came back to base with more than a few leaks ---
Click Here
(Hit the right arrow button to see more pictures)
You can read more about the OH-58 at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OH-58God bless our
heroes!

The Frick Collection owns some
famous and valuable historic paintings that it only shows now and then (some
rarely). It now has only one painting on display --- Antea by Francesco
Mazzola Parmigianino (1503-1540) ---
http://www.frick.org/collection/index.htm

This student-sponsored "art
show" may draw thousandsThe College of William & Mary, of late the site of
debates over
social issues and the First Amendment,has
affirmed the right of students to sponsor an art show by sex workers. TheSex
Workers’ Art Showfeatures visual and
performing arts by strippers, prostitutes, porn stars and others. While the
show tends to tour college campuses, some have suggested that William & Mary
might be better off finding another venue in the area for the show,
scheduled for the campus on February 4. Gene R. Nichol, president of the
college, issued a
statementin which he said that while he wished
that students hadn’t scheduled the event, it would be wrong for him to
censor it. “There are powerful reasons that colleges have student-funded and
student-governed speaker series. They help assure a robust program of
expression on campus. Censoring them because administrators disagree with a
performance’s content contradicts values residing at the core of the
American university,” he said. Inside Higher Ed, January 30, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/30/qt

According to a Gallup Poll from last year, 64
percent of Americans drink alcohol. Thirty-four percent of American drinkers
choose wine. Fortunately, wine is not rising in price at the rate of oil. That's
the good news. We already know the bad news about gasoline, feeling it every
time we pull up to the pump. That precious petroleum product is now triple what
it was just a few years ago. Wow! Wouldn't it be nice to increase your hourly
billing rate three-fold? The next time a client balks at your price increase
maybe you could pour them a glass of Merlot and remind them that their dollar
goes a lot farther with you than it does with Shell, Gulf, and Exxon! Rob Nance, AccountingWeb
Newsletter, January 31, 2008

The brief evidence cited above shows that there is
an unhealthy relationship between the UK state and major accounting firms.
Accounting firms have penetrated the state and their many anti-social activities
go unchecked. Despite dodgy audits and dubious tax avoidance schemes no UK
government has ever prosecuted any major accounting firm. Is it any wonder that
the public confidence in political institutions is low? Bikesh Shrestha, "Heart of darkness:
Accounting firms have penetrated the UK state and their many antisocial
activities are going unchecked," The Guardian, January 9, 2008 ---
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/prem_sikka_/2008/01/heart_of_darkness.html

In a brazen attempt to attract students to the
pleasures of reading by associating classic literature with acts of senseless
violence, a professor at a well-known liberal-arts college ran the following log
in the pages of the campus newspaper. The local bookstore noted a sudden spike
in sales of The Iliad. Lawrence Douglas and Alexander George,
"The Literary Police Blotter," Chronicle of Higher Education Chronicle Review,
February 1, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i21/21b00501.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

PI, the popular mathematical symbol, today announced
that it is a candidate for the presidency. Pi's campaign theme "Endless Change."
is based on its infinite and endless series of digits. "We expect an uphill
battle. e and PHI have also announced. Press Release Newswire, January 30,
2008 ---
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/1/prweb662364.htm
Jensen Comment
But Epsilon is planning to enter the race with the theme "all changes will be
asymptotically small." My vote if for Epsilon.

To some extent, our qualified optimism is borne out
by impartial data. In this article we look at three pieces of evidence: the
underlying social conditions in poor countries; poverty alleviation over the
past decade; and the incidence of wars and political violence. By those measures
the world seems to be in rather better shape than most people realise . . . In
China 25 years ago, over 600m people—two-thirds of the population—were living in
extreme poverty (on $1 a day or less). Now, the number on $1 a day is below
180m. In the world as a whole, a stunning 135m people escaped dire poverty
between 1999 and 2004. This is more than the population of Japan or Russia—and
more people, more quickly than at any other time in history. Poverty alleviation
has gone hand in hand with improvements in basic services. Digging canals and
building water-treatment plants has increased the number of people with access
to safe water: in South Asia, for instance, the number of those without clean
water has been nearly halved since 1990. Thanks to this, and to better
public-health provision, the rate at which people die from infectious diseases
such as malaria and tuberculosis is falling in most poor countries, Africa
excepted . . . A generation ago the biggest worry about poor countries was
over-population. Books such as “The Population Bomb” (1968) and “The Limits to
Growth” (1972) predicted Malthusian crises in countries where women were having
five children or more. Since then the fertility rate (the average number of
children a woman can expect during her lifetime) in low- and middle-income
countries has crashed. In East Asia and the Pacific, the rate was 5.4 in 1970.
Now it is 2.1. In South Asia, the fertility rate halved (from 6.0 to 3.1). In
the world as a whole, fertility has fallen from 4.8 to 2.6 in a generation (25
years). The biggest decline is in those countries that are most involved with
globalisation (especially in East Asia, though China is a special case because
of its one-child policy). The most important exception to the rule of declining
fertility is sub-Saharan Africa. All the countries with fertility rates over 5.0
are in Africa (with the one exception of Yemen) . . . Bad government and lack of
growth often, though far from always, go together. Whatever the problems of
globalisation, they are dwarfed by the penalties of being untouched by it. The
World Social Forum, a gathering of self-proclaimed progressives who want to turn
back trade, growth and globalisation has adopted as its slogan the motto
“Another world is possible”. In reality, another and better world is painfully
and fitfully coming into being. "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," The Economist, February 1,
2008, Page 27 ---
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10564141

Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, age 41, who holds a Ph.D. in
international relations from the University of Oxford, is a high-profile member
of a cadre of so-called warrior-scholars gathered around Gen. David H. Petraeus,
who himself holds a doctorate from Princeton University in international
relations. Petraeus, commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, has long
advocated that the military repair ties to academe rendered asunder by the
Vietnam War. Charged with drafting a new doctrine on counterinsurgency
operations, Petraeus sought the specialized knowledge, fresh thinking, and
cultural sensitivity of journalists, human-rights activists, scholars, and
members of the armed forces like Nagl. Nagl will join the Center for a New
American Security, a foreign-policy think tank in Washington. Although he cited
family reasons for his retirement, his sudden departure sparked a wave of
hand-wringing as commentators questioned the military's ability to retain its
most capable and intellectually adventurous officers.
Evan R. Goldstein, "An Unscholarly War?" Chronicle of Higher Education's
Chronicle Review, February 1, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i21/21b00401.htm?utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

Iran declared on Sunday that a French military base
in the Gulf would not help security and peace in the oil-rich region. Paris
signed a deal with the United Arab Emirates in January to build France's first
permanent military installation in the Gulf, just across the water from Iran.
The base will accommodate 400 to 500 personnel, keeping France within reach of
sea lanes through which over a third of global oil shipments pass.Reuters, February 3, 2008 ---
Click Here

We are concerned with the bi-partisan "Libel
Terrorism Protection Act," introduced in the New York Assembly and Senate by
Assemblyman Rory Lancman (D) and Senator Dean Skelos (R).This bill has been
introduced to protect New York authors who investigate and expose the enablers
of terrorism from libel lawsuits filed in foreign courts. Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld,
author of Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed - And How to Stop It, was the
target of one of those lawsuits. The wealthy Saudi who filed the lawsuit against
Dr. Ehrenfeld in the United Kingdom has successfully silenced more than 40
authors and publishers, including many Americans. If these lawsuits are allowed
to continue, the ramifications for our cherished freedoms of speech and the
press are chilling and ominous. The sooner "The Libel Terrorism Protection Act,"
is signed into law, the sooner New York - the publishing capital of the U.S. and
the free world - and New York authors will be protected from meritless and
frivolous libel suits filed in foreign jurisdictions.Brigitte Gabriel as quoted in a
January 29, 2008 message from Naomi Ragen
[nragen@netvision.net.il]

GodTube is a new online video social networking
community for Christians -- basically, YouTube for The Righteous. Its motto is:
"Broadcast Him." The service is essential, says former Arkansas Governor Mike
Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister and Republican presidential candidate,
because Christians need a way to infuse themselves and their views into the
political process. Sarah Lai Stirland, "Huckabee
Endorses Hell-Fearing Christian YouTube Competitor 'GodTube'," Wired News,
January 28, 2008 ---
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/01/christianity-ne.html
Jensen Comment
It always amazes me that so many Christians who abhor physical torture promise
perpetual hellfire torture to unforgiven sinners whether or not they are
Christians.
The GodTube link
http://www.godtube.com/

What exactly was wrong with Bobby Fischer was a
subject of much debate. The combination of high intelligence and social
dysfunction suggested autism; but he had been a normal boy in many respects,
enjoying Superman comics and going to hockey games. He had got mixed up in the
1960s with the Worldwide Church of God, a crazed millenarian outfit, and perhaps
had learned from them to hate and revile the Jews; though he was Jewish himself,
with a Jewish mother who had tried psychologists and the columns of the local
paper to cure him of too much chess, but who still couldn't stop the pocket set
coming out at the dinner table . . . Perhaps, in the end, the trouble was this:
that chess, as he once said, was life, and there was nothing more. Mr Fischer
was not good at anything else, had not persevered in school, had never done
another job, had never married, but had pinned every urgent minute of his
existence to 32 pieces and 64 black and white squares. He dreamed of a house in
Beverly Hills that would be built in the shape of a rook. "Bobby Fischer," The Economist, February 1, 2008, Page 84
---
http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10559454

With all the indignation shown over allegations that
Israel is causing a humanitarian crisis and exercising “collective punishment”
on Gaza’s Palestinians, few have stopped to consider the possibility that this
“crisis” has been engineered by Hamas to score a propaganda victory against
Israel using the gullible Western media as its vehicle. This “crisis” has all
the markings of a pre-arranged publicity event - skillful manipulation of the
Western media, the use of falsehoods and selective information, staged
atrocities, and all the other time-honored methods used by unscrupulous
propagandists. Since the Palestinians staged the death of the child Mohammed
al-Dura in his father's arms back in September 2000, Palestinian propaganda has
not enjoyed such international success as it is enjoying today in Gaza.
Accumulated evidence suggests that Hamas has knowingly diverted gas from Gaza’s
domestic generators for the production of its Kassam missiles and has
transferred other fuel supplies, electrical power and foodstuffs for its other
political and military purposes; and despite the fact that Gaza continues to
receive 70% of its electricity supply directly from Israel and another 5 percent
from Egypt (none of which is ever acknowledged by the international media),
Hamas officials, with great bravado, recently shut down Gaza’s major power plant
plunging Gaza City into total darkness. TV reporters and crews were of course on
hand to witness “the shutdown” and minutes later, Gazans took to the streets in
a pre-arranged candlelight protest march blaming Israel. Does anyone really
believe that a power station as large as the one in Gaza keeps only a one-day
diesel fuel reserve?” Mark Silverberg, "Playing the
Media," The New Media Journal, January 29, 2008 ---
http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/silverberg/2008/01292008.htm

The officials noted Robert Malley, a principal Obama
foreign policy adviser, has penned numerous opinion articles, many of them
co-written with a former adviser to the late Palestinian Authority President
Yasser Arafat, petitioning for dialogue with Hamas and blasting Israel for
numerous policies he says harm the Palestinian cause . . . Malley also
previously penned a well-circulated New York Times piece largely blaming Israel
for the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David in 2000
when Arafat turned down a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and eastern
sections of Jerusalem and instead returned to the Middle East to launch an
intifada, or terrorist campaign, against the Jewish state. Malley's contentions
have been strongly refuted by key participants at Camp David, including
President Bill Clinton, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and primary U.S.
envoy to the Middle East Dennis Ross, all of whom squarely blamed Arafat's
refusal to make peace for the talks' failure. Aaron Klein, "Obama aide wants talks
with terrorists: Foreign adviser's 'anti-Israel policies,' sympathy for
Hamas, raise concerns," WorldNetDaily, January 29, 2008 ---
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59930
Jensen Comment
Something should be said in favor of a candidate's having inputs from various
factions after being elected to office, but doing so beforehand can be
hazardous to getting into office. Having the anti-Israeli Robert Malley as a
salaried aide helps explain why Obama is losing the
Jewish Lobby
votes to Hillary Clinton. If Obama wins the Democratic nomination, traditionally
democratic Jews will be put in a bind to support the Democratic candidate. This
may be the best opportunity yet for the GOP to attract Jewish voters. What will
Barbara do if and when Obama wins the nomination? At the moment her powerful
support and dollars are going for Hillary Clinton ---
http://www.barbrastreisand.com/index.php?page=news&n_id=588
It's more likely that Malley will be fired from the Obama camp quite soon and
then rehired if and when Obama wins the November 2008 election.

Sid Davidoff, a lobbyist who has been involved in
New York government and politics since the 1960s, said: “I think there is going
to be a split between established older voters in the Jewish community, with
whom Hillary will do well, and younger and more liberal Jews who see Obama as an
agent of change.” Although it might be expected that Senator Clinton will win
the support of more voters, including Jewish voters, in the state she
represents, even the slightest shift in Jewish support is a subject of interest.
Glenn Collins, "For Jewish Voters in
New York, ‘Almost an Embarrassment of Riches’," The New York Times,
February 3, 2008 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/nyregion/03jewish.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Senator Barak Obama's surprise landslide victory in
the South Carolina primary demarcates a turning point in modern American
politics. Can it be a coincidence that it occurred in the same week that
financial markets showed their wildest gyrations in post-war history? Days ago,
every poll indicated that economic weakness gave the edge to Senator Hillary
Clinton, whom voters regarded as a superior manager. But the Democrats of South
Carolina chose a miracle over a manager, for the same rational reasons that a
down-and-outer spends his last dollar on the lottery. Obama's South Carolina
victory speech was the economic equivalent of a carnival snake-oil pitch. He
promised to "stop giving tax breaks to rich companies and instead put the money
in the pockets of struggling homeowners who can't pay their mortgages", and at
the same time stop the export of American jobs overseas, while raising
everyone's wages. The crowd chanted, "Yes we can! Yes we can!" Excuse me: No,
you can't. You can't keep inefficient American factories open without massive
tax breaks to corporations, in the form of tariffs or otherwise. In 1992, voters
rejected the same message from Ross Perot, who warned that free trade with
Mexico would create a "giant sucking sound" as American jobs disappeared, and
chose the free-trader Bill Clinton. But that was then: this is now. Spengler, "Obama bin lottery By
Spengler," Asia Times, January 29, 2008 ---
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JA29Dj06.html
Jensen Comment
Is is possible to have an undergraduate degree and a law degree without ever
taking Economics 101?
As Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool some of the people some of the time . . .
"
Obama's promises will only hold in the magical land of the Big Rock Candy
Mountain ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QACDHNb5iWs

Who bought into the promises of a magical land of the Big Rock Candy
Mountain?Barack Obama routed Hillary Clinton 2 to 1 in the
heaviest turnout in a Democratic primary in the history of South Carolina. Such
a defeat would normally be a crushing and perhaps fatal blow to a rival's
campaign. Bill and Hillary laughed it off. Indeed, even before the voting had
ended, Bill Clinton had tarnished and diminished Barack's victory. Responding to
an unrelated question, he volunteered that Jesse Jackson won South Carolina
twice in the 1980s. This is an Arkansan way of saying black candidates always do
well when there is a large black bloc vote, as in the Deep South, but no one
should take this seriously. By introducing Jackson and earlier saying the
Palmetto State contest would be about gender and race, Clinton set the media to
looking beyond Barack's total vote to its racial composition. And, sure enough,
when the final returns came in, Barack had won 78 percent of the black vote, and
lost 76 percent of the white vote. Pat Buchanan, "Obama's hollow victory," WorldNetDaily, January 29,
2008 ---
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59934

An ethnic split in the Democratic race hurts both
leading (Democratic Party) candidates ---
perhaps to the advantage of Republicans come November."The Cooks Spoil Obama's Broth," The Economist,
February 1, 2008, Page 31

Last week the U.N. Human Rights Council held an
emergency session, organized by Arab and Muslim nations, to condemn Israel for
its military actions in the Gaza strip. That the council is capable of swift and
decisive action is a welcome surprise; that Israel remains the only nation to
provoke such action is not. In the 17 months since its inception, the body has
passed 13 condemnations, 12 of them against Israel.Ronan Farrow, "The U.N.'s
Human-Rights Sham," by Ronan Farrow, The Wall Street Journal, January 29,
2008; Page A16 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120156891659323879.html?mod=todays_us_opinion
Jensen Comment
It's sad that Israel's military actions would cease if Gaza stopped sending more
frequent and bigger rockets into Israel. The U.N. doesn't want to test this
theory.

One of the most dangerous proposals is now moving
through the House of Representatives. The Emergency Home Ownership and Mortgage
Equity Protection Act was voted out of the Judiciary Committee recently. It
takes aim at Chapter 13 bankruptcy proceedings to make it easier for buyers to
rewrite the terms of their mortgage contracts in court. It would do this by
changing how a debtor's principal residence is treated in bankruptcy, allowing
mortgage contracts to be modified by the courts. In short, if this bill becomes
law a mortgage would no longer be a matter between a borrower and a lender, but
instead, between a borrower, a lender and a judge. Rather than interpreting
private contracts, judges would suddenly be able to rewrite them.Dick Armie, "A Mortgage 'Tweak' We
Don't Need," The Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2008; Page A17 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120156746465123881.html
Jensen Comment
Good intentions have a way of backfiring. This proposed law is in the favor of
honest high earning workers and crooks. It almost assures us that low-income
people will be denied mortgages since they, along with the crooks, are the most
likely to manipulate this bankruptcy provision to steal from home lenders.

The death in custody of an ethnic Kurdish
university student this month in the northwestern Iranian city of Sanandaj
has prompted anger in Iran and international calls for an inquiry into his
death.

The student, Ebrahim Lotfallahi, was
picked up by intelligence officers on January 6 as he was leaving the
Sanandaj campus of Payam Noor University, where he was a fourth-year law
student.

Mr. Lotfallahi’s family visited him three
days later and found him in good spirits, although it was not clear what
charges had been brought against him, Human Rights Watch says in its account
of the case. “On January 15, officials from the detention center contacted
Lotfallahi’s parents and informed them that they had buried their son in a
local cemetery. The officials claimed that Lotfallahi had committed suicide
in his cell.”

Mr. Lotfallahi’s death “has angered
student activists, who believe it is part of a campaign of harassment aimed
at supressing dissent before the March elections,” The Telegraph, a British
newspaper, reported today. “They say students in the Kurdish part of the
country, which includes Sanandaj, have borne the brunt of the crackdown.”
The paper also reported that Mr. Lotfallahi’s grave had been filled with
cement, to prevent his body from being exhumed for examination.

Mr. Lotfallahi’s death followed the death
last October in northwestern Iran of a 27-year-old female doctor, who also
was in custody when officials claimed she had committed suicide.

On Wednesday the American government
joined Human Rights Watch in calling for a full investigation of Mr.
Lotfallahi’s death, the Reuters news agency reported.

A statement on the State Department’s Web
site urged the Iranian government to “release all individuals held without
due process and a fair trial” and singled out “three Amir Kabir University
students that prison authorities refuse to free despite an order issued by
an Iranian judge in late December.”

Whether Ms. Merkel does indeed "recognize" this may
determine whether Europe's largest economy can build on its recent recovery, or
will slide back into the stagnation of the 1990s. The Chancellor already watered
down her reform plans after a surprisingly narrow victory in 2005 stuck her with
a difficult coalition partner. Ahead of national elections next year, she may
feel pressed to dilute even further. Ms. Merkel got herself into this hole. With
precious little leadership from Berlin, the previously marginal Left Party set
the terms of the national debate. The Social Democrats, desperate for votes,
followed them by equating "social justice" with expanded welfare benefits. Ms.
Merkel didn't stand her ground.
"Ms. Merkel's Left Problem," The Wall Street Journal Europe, January 29, 2008
---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120155373554823181.html

Despite Hugo Chávez's vow to build a classless
society in Venezuela, banker Víctor Vargas is thriving. His success highlights
the durability of the country's elites no matter who is in power. Víctor Vargas
is a polo-playing banker who zips between his six homes in a fleet of luxury
jets. So you might expect him to be struggling in today's Venezuela, where
President Hugo Chávez has vowed to build a classless society. But Mr. Vargas, 55
years old, hasn't missed a beat. His Banco Occidental de Descuento is expanding
amid an oil-fueled economic surge. Like other bankers, he snares profits dealing
in a flood of government-issued debt. And the Chávez years have done little to
damp Mr. Vargas's exuberance for the trappings of wealth. John Lyons, "Polo-Loving Banker
Lives Really Large In Chávez Socialism: Venezuela's Mr. Vargas Has Yachts,
and Good Timing; 'I've Been Rich All My Life'," The Wall Street Journal,
January 29, 2008; Page A1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120157299096224193.html?mod=todays_us_page_one

Kudos to John Bolton who has repeatedly warned that
the denuclearization deal with North Korea was too good to be true ("North
Korea's True Colors," op-ed, Jan. 11). Now that Mr. Bolton's predictions have
been vindicated, and it has become clear that the Korean desk diplomats at the
State Department and their boss Condoleezza Rice have failed miserably,
President Bush should pay attention to his august former representative to the
United Nations. By the way, it is not his legacy that President Bush should
focus on in the last 12 months of his administration, but the future standing of
the U.S. in an increasingly dangerous and unruly world where rogue strongmen
flex their muscles. Robert Zeidman, "Bolton is Right on
Korea," The Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2008; Page A15 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120157162881724101.html?mod=todays_us_page_one

Army officials in upstate New York instructed
representatives from the Department of Veterans Affairs not to help disabled
soldiers at Fort Drum Army base with their military disability paperwork last
year. That paperwork can be crucial because it helps determine whether soldiers
will get annual disability payments and health care after they're discharged.
Now soldiers at Fort Drum say they feel betrayed by the institutions that are
supposed to support them. The soldiers want to know why the Army would want to
stop them from getting help with their disability paperwork and why the VA—
whose mission is to help veterans — would agree to the Army's request. Ari Shapiro, "Army Blocks Disability
Paperwork Aid at Fort Drum," NPR, January 29, 2008 ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18492376

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government started a project
Monday to cut down 1.8 million cedar trees in the mountainous Tama region west
of Tokyo to help people with cedar pollen allergies. "Tokyo launches cedar pollen reduction project in Tama," Japan
Times, November 14, 2006 ---
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20061114a3.html
Jensen Comment
That should help warm the planet. Where's Al Gore when we really need him?

Faith in the Federal Reserve is not what it used to
be. Since September the Fed has cut its policy rate by 1.75 percentage points,
to 3.5%. It still has plenty of firepower left—rates are some way above the 1%
level reached in 2003—but few seem willing to rely on monetary policy alone to
save the day. Politicians and pundits alike were making a case for a fiscal
stimulus package even before the Fed's surprise rate cut on January 22nd. That
Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman today, has given his blessing to the plan only
adds to the impression that central banks have lost their grip. What lies behind
this loss of faith? One cause is the feeling that overly loose monetary policy
got the economy into this mess. Repeated cuts in interest rates during the last
downturn, in 2001-03, fuelled the housing and credit bubbles that are now
bursting to such damaging effect. The legacies of that boom—falling asset
prices, high consumer debt and bank losses—may now hamper the ability of central
banks to prop up spending. The Economist, February 1, 2008,
Page 74 ---
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10566838

In other words, the government should go
out and borrow even more money and pass it around for us to spend. The
experts caution that for maximum stimulus effect, we must be sure to spend
it immediately. No squirreling it away for a rainy day. In drinking circles,
they call this hair of the dog: to cure a hangover, you have another drink.

A few Republicans are embarrassed enough
by this universal wisdom that they are making noises about paying for the
stimulus by cutting government spending. Unfortunately, even if such
spending cuts took place, which is unlikely, they would defeat the purpose
of the stimulus. Bush, for example, proposes to pump about $145 billion into
the economy through tax cuts of various sorts. This is a classic Keynesian
stimulus, and the whole purpose of that is to increase demand in the
economy. Instead of a self-feeding spiral downward—I get laid off and can't
pay my mortgage, so the bank fires you, and you don't buy a new TV, and so
on—we get a self-feeding spiral upward: I take my government check and buy
that new TV, Best Buy has the money to hire you as a salesman, you then buy
a house and take out a mortgage, and so on. If the government puts $145
billion into the economy with its stimulus and then takes $145 billion back
out again by cutting spending, the two effects will cancel each other out.

It is a sign of how completely Republican
thinking now dominates discussions of economic policy that so few of the
stimulus ideas floating around Washington involve increasing federal
spending. It used to be that stimulus debates were about a tax cut vs. a
spending increase. An increase in federal spending can goose the economy
just like cutting taxes. The government builds a bridge or a highway, people
get jobs, take their families to Olive Garden, which hires more waiters, and
so on. In fact, direct government spending is a more efficient stimulus than
an equivalent tax cut because all of it gets spent. When actual people get
hold of the money, a few might have an unpatriotic tendency to save some of
it.

But the current debate is virtually all
about tax cuts. Republicans want them to go to business. Democrats want them
to go to the poor and middle class. Both parties are fond of tax credits for
approved interest groups and favored forms of behavior. The notion that the
government is good for anything except issuing checks and printing money has
just about disappeared.

People will say they don't trust the
government to spend the money wisely. I go further: I don't trust the
government or the Washington establishment or the presidential candidates of
either party or, for that matter, the voters themselves to come up with a
stimulus that will do the job intended and not make matters worse. Often in
the past, these stimuli have come too late or been too small to do anything
but add to the deficit. But that's not my gripe. My gripe is that telling
Americans they need to borrow and spend just a little bit more to get us
past this recession—and then reform their ways—is like telling an alcoholic
he needs one more drink before sobering up.

I think we should sober up first. Plenty
of people are still partying as if it were 2006. Right-wing radio talk shows
are still dominated by ads for second mortgages. Every day's mail still
brings fat envelopes from companies begging to issue you a credit card.
Every TV commercial that isn't about some prescription drug for a disease
you never heard of (but may well have, now that they mention it) seems to be
for payday loans. Always borrow responsibly, they say. A little late for
that.

Here's a thought. Suppose we don't go
further into debt in the name of fiscal stimulus. Suppose we stop selling
ourselves piece by piece to foreigners (and suppose we stop blaming the
foreigners for problems of our own making). Suppose we use taxing and
spending to show the world that we can behave responsibly, see how the world
responds to that, and let the Federal Reserve Board supply the stimulus with
lower interest rates. If we must have a fiscal stimulus, let's make sure
it's not too enjoyable. Build some rapid transit; don't give away any tax
breaks.

Suppose we stop looking in the mirror and
saying "Gosh, you're drunk. Waiter, I'll have another."

Mr. Rusher wrote
an article last week about vice-presidents: what they need to bring to
the ticket, how they affect elections, etc. He suggested Dr. Condoleezza
Rice as a VP pick.

What a great idea!!!! I have been on the
Condi for President bandwagon for years. Our efforts to draft her failed,
but we did make a big splash.

At the Mackinac Island Conference we began
Plan B: Promoting her as a VP. This strategy cut down on our costs
significantly, and was more appealing to those who already had a favorite
for Pres.

Mr. Rusher explained the demographic
aspect of the idea: appealing to black voters and female voters. These two
blocks are DNC strongholds. This is a good idea strategically, BUT we need
to focus on what she has done under the Bush presidencies (both 41 and 43).

*As an expert on Russian affairs, she
was able to stand up to Yeltsin and build relations with Putin.

* As the face of the US to the outside
world, she was the one person who countries who hated Bush would deal
with.

* She was able to convince North Korea
to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons and come to a bargaining
table. (This is a country that considered nukes a "birth right".)

* She is a vehement defender of the War on
Terror. This is very important. Despite the moonbattery and protests about
the war, she was able to articulate time and time again why we are there.
Anyone who can handle both Yeltsin and Barbara Boxer is one tough cookie.
She would always relay the good news in Iraq development (including the new
hospital built in Baghdad.) The new infrastructure developed in the peaceful
Iraqi provinces have Dr. Rice's stamp of approval.( For a full view of the
progress in iraq, see http://www.cpa-iraq.org.) Progress has been slow, but
steady. Some in the Military are predicting more troops coming home as soon
as this year.

Many naysayers, in the GOP, say we should
avoid any connection to Bush 43 at all costs. I say Bush did what was
necessary, and the work is not done yet. We need to have some sort of
carryover into the new administration to ensure a smooth transition both at
home and abroad.

Anyone who says Condi supporters are
racist and sexist are dead wrong. We are realists. We support Dr. Rice not
because of her immutable characteristics, but because of her strength and
leadership.

Jensen Comment
It's not likely to happen that Dr. Rice gets the GOP nod as a candidate to
be Vice=President of the United States, but this is one way of assuring that an African
American will be on the winning ticket in November assuming Obama beats
Hillary beforehand. If Hillary should win the Democratic nomination then
we'd be assured that a woman will be on the winning ticket.

Dr. Rice has has fought prejudice with grace her entire
life --- hurtful racial prejudice and intimidation as a child in Alabama,
liberal academic prejudice as a professor and academic vice-president at
Stanford University, undermining employees in the U.S. State Department, a
hateful liberal press, the terrorist media, and most of all CNBC's hateful
Keith Olbermann who blames her for everything bad on earth. It's obvious
that she scares the crap out of extremists like Olbermann. Through it all
she's been super intelligent, talented, graceful, tactful, and held her head
high in dignity against impossible odds.

Forwarded by Aaron Konstam
For those who have not heard the government will give you coupons for $40 on up
to two digital to analog tv converters. Apply at:
http://www.dtv2009.gov
or call (888) DTV-2009

We would like to continue to use our analog set because it has apace-saving
built-in VCR and DVD players.

CiteULike social networking for scholarly citationsAt first glance, it seems like a nerdier version of
Facebook. There’s the profile picture, the list of interests, the space for your
Web site. Most of the members have Ph.D.’s, though, and instead of posting party
invites or YouTube videos, their “Recent Activity” is full of academic papers
and scholarly treatises. Welcome to
CiteULike, a social bookmarking tool that
allows users to post, share and comment on each other’s links — in this case,
citations to journal articles with titles like “Trend detection through temporal
link analysis” and “The Social Psychology of Inter- and Intragroup Conflict in
Governmental Politics.” It’s a sort of “del.icio.us
for academics,” said Kevin Emamy, a representative for the site’s London-based
holding company, Oversity Ltd. It started out as a personal Web project in 2004
and grew organically by word of mouth. Today, it has some 70,000 registered
users and a million page views a month, he said.
"Keeping Citations Straight, and Finding New Ones," by Andy Guess, Inside
Higher Ed, January 31, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/31/citeulike

www.berkeley-term-papers.com;
which is in top 10 in Yahoo & MSN for their targeted
keywords and receives nice amount of traffic daily (email me for stats).

As an ongoing process to increase the link
popularity of the site, I am looking for some good quality sites to exchange
links with my client's site. I recently came across your site through search
and found it beneficial and informative for our site's visitors. I would
like to offer you a link exchange with my site.

washingtonpost.com today ran
a story I wrote that examines the ever-evolving scamsthat organized cyber thieves are coming up with to con
people into laundering stolen funds on their behalf. The piece features
interviews with a couple of unfortunate victims who lost money from
so-called "money mule" scams. The following blog entry looks deeper into the
essential role that mules play in many cyber crime operations, as well as
the growing number of people who become mules knowing full well they are
aiding criminals.

Money mules typically are recruited via spam or
targeted e-mail. The recipient is often told the potential employer found
her resume on Monster.com and would he or she be interested in working a
small number of hours per week to make anywhere from hundreds to thousands
of dollars a week. The company usually represents itself as some kind of
international finance operation or shipping company. In reality, most are
fronts for cyber crime operations that are desperately seeking a constant
stream of new recruits to help launder the proceeds of phishing scams and
password-stealing computer viruses.

For example, money mules have helped to generate
profits for the individual(s) behind some 15 separate, targeted malicious
software attacks last year that came disguised as e-mails from the Better
Business Bureau, according to iDefense, a security firm owned by Verisign.
In those scams, the fraudsters sent virus-laden e-mails to tens of thousands
of individuals whose resume and contact information were stolen in a
previous compromise of a Monster.com job-seekers database,
said Matt Richard, director of iDefense Rapid
Response.

Targets of the BBB scams received e-mails that
addressed them by name, and were told that a complaint was lodged against
their company. Recipients who clicked on the link to view the "complaint"
were taken to a Web site that tried to silently install software designed to
steal passwords and financial data.

Richard said the BBB scammers used the same list of
Monster.com job searchers to help monetize the credit card and bank account
information stolen by the malicious software. Indeed, Richard said, the
e-mail templates that the scammers used in both campaigns to customize
messages with the names of recipients were found on the same Web server.

I have been writing regular blogs for The Guardian,
a UK national newspaper. The articles are available athttp://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/prem_sikka/index.htmland offer a critical commentary on business and
accountancy matters. For three days after each article the website takes
readers' comments and colleagues are welcome to add comments, critical or
otherwise. The most recent article appeared on 29 January 2008.

There is now also an extensive database of
corporate and accountancy misdemeanours on the AABA website (

Remember the movie "Love Story" and its
star-crossed student lovers? Such torrid campus romances may be becoming a
thing of the past. College life has become so competitive, and students so
focused on careers, that many aren't looking for spouses anymore.

Replacing college as the top marital hunting ground
is the office. Only 14% of people who are married or in a relationship say
they met their partners in school or college, says a 2006 Harris Interactive
study of 2,985 adults; 18% met at work. That's a reversal from 15 years ago,
when 23% of married couples reported meeting in school or college and only
15% cited work, according to a 1992 study of 3,432 adults by the University
of Chicago.

. . .

Researchers cite a couple of factors. Young adults
are delaying marriage, for one thing. In the past 15 years, men's median age
at first marriage has risen by 1.2 years to 27.5, and by 1.4 years for
women, to 25.5, the highest in more than a century, Census Bureau data show.

Also at work is "credential inflation" -- an
increase in the qualifications required for many skilled jobs, says Janet
Lever, a sociology professor at California State University, Los Angeles.
Many young adults want the flexibility to relocate freely and immerse
themselves in new work and educational opportunities before making room for
marriage and family. As a result, students favor "light relationships that
aren't going to compromise where they go to grad school or which job they
take," she says.

Cody Cheetham, 22, a Purdue senior, is looking for
a marketing job after she graduates in May and plans on getting an MBA. "A
lot of us don't even know where we're going to be living six months after we
graduate," she says. "We don't want to bring another person into the chaos
of our lives."

I couldn’t help feeling a bit of poignancy as I
reported and wrote today’s Work & Family column on the eclipse of campus
romance. Fewer college students are finding their mates on campus, as the
office replaces school as the No. 1 place for pairing up.

The historic shift toward marrying later that
underlies this trend is proceeding at a breakneck pace, in historical terms.
After hovering almost unchanged between the late 1940s and the mid-1970s,
the median age at first marriage has surged by more than four years, to 27.5
years for men and 25.5 for women — the highest levels recorded by the Census
Bureau since 1890. My own family patterns reflect this: My late parents met
in high school. My two older siblings met their lifelong spouses in
undergraduate school. Intent on establishing a career in the bra-burning
1970s, I waited until I was working before finding my future husband, as did
my three Gen-X stepchildren. My two Gen-Y birth children, 17 and 20, seem
even more years removed from making such a choice. At this rate, my
grandkids will be on Social Security before they tie the knot.

Waiting to get married is wise in many ways; I
recommend it to my own kids. Men and women alike can benefit from investing
heavily in education and skill-building before shifting gears to make room
for marriage and family.

Question
Can you imagine what would happen if required courses for "Sports Management"
majors included calculus, multivariate statistical modeling, and SPSS
applications? And maybe even surface mapping in 3-D?

Football coaches have never been known to be
particularly intellectual, tending to favor their "gut feelings" over
objective data. But that is slowly changing. Professional-football general
managers and coaches are increasingly using analytics--the intensive use of
data and statistics to make decisions--both in evaluating a player's
performance and in calling plays during the game. Some experts credit part
of the success of the New England Patriots, who are competing for their
fourth Super Bowl in six seasons on Sunday, to this trend in analytics.

"It is generally accepted that the Patriots are one
of the most analytically advanced franchises in the NFL," says Aaron Schatz,
the creator of
FootballOutsiders.com, a site that uses statistics
to analyze the game.

Such heavy use of analytics has already transformed
the management of professional baseball, and now it is making inroads into
football. KC Joyner, author of
Scientific Football 2007, a book that uses a
performance-based metric system to analyze nearly every measureable
statistic in the NFL, says that analytics began to emerge in football in the
past five years as teams have gone from just analyzing game footage to
putting a quantitative value on a player's performance.

One of the more widely used metrics is the
quarterback rating. It is a complex rating that's computed based on complete
passes, pass attempts, passing yards, touchdown passes, and interceptions.
"This is a pretty critical metric since quarterbacks are one of the most
important players," says Tom Davenport,
a professor of IT and management at Babson College and
author of
Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning.

Teams continue to analyze video to track, tabulate,
and calculate how many times the opposing team, for example, blitzes when
its defense is in a nickel formation, but they are also starting to use
video to track the number of times that a cornerback misreads a slant route
or runs into another defender when covering a pick play. "It's not just
about doing advanced scouting on teams' formations, but targeting players so
teams say, 'We can run this play at this lineman,' or 'This cornerback can't
cover this particular route,'" says Joyner.

Beyond targeting players, football is beginning to
use analytics to select the best players for the lowest price. "The Patriots
are particularly good at optimizing their payroll," says Davenport. "This is
what a corporation would call human resource analytics, and in any sport,
that is probably the single most important thing to do."

In a move that would provide tens of thousands of
athletes with more money for college expenses, the National Collegiate
Athletic Association agreed on Tuesday to reallocate up to $228-million to
settle a massive antitrust lawsuit filed by four former players. But the
deal could have costly implications for colleges in the coming years.

Under the settlement, which must still be approved
by a federal court in California, the NCAA agreed to set aside $218-million
over the next five years to help the more than 150,000 Division I athletes
in all sports pay for basic expenses not covered by their athletics
scholarships. The NCAA would allocate an additional $10-million over the
next three years to cover career-development services and other educational
expenses for some 30,000 current and former Division I football and men's
basketball players.

Much of that money was already designated to help
colleges hire tutors, build academic facilities for athletes, and assist
needy students. The settlement would allow more of those funds to go
directly to athletes for their out-of-pocket expenses, such as personal
travel.

Meanwhile, the settlement could hit athletics
departments with significant new costs. It would allow Division I programs
to begin offering year-round, comprehensive health insurance to athletes, as
well as basic accident insurance for injuries players sustain while
participating in intercollegiate athletics. Insurance experts say those
policies could cost colleges $100,000 or more a year.

Hardship Complaint

The plaintiffs, four former Division I football and
men's basketball players, accused the NCAA of creating a hardship for
college athletes by capping the amount of scholarship aid they may receive.
Full athletics awards at Division I colleges include tuition, fees, books,
and room and board, but the players' complaint asserted that athletes must
often pay $2,500 or more annually out of their own pockets for basic
expenses not covered by their athletics scholarships.

Members of the Coalition on Intercollegiate
Athletics, a group of 56 faculty senates from some of the biggest athletics
programs, said the settlement was good news for players—but could present
additional problems for athletics departments in five years. After 2012,
colleges could be forced to pay for athletes' out-of-pocket expenses
themselves, said Nathan Tublitz, a professor of biology at the University of
Oregon who is the group's co-chair.

"Any settlement that helps student-athletes
financially and enables them to stay in school and graduate is a good
settlement," Mr. Tublitz said in an interview on Tuesday. "But we're
concerned that after five years, someone is going to have to pick up this
cost, and that's a lot of money that could be transferred onto
institutions."

'Landmark' Settlement

The size of the deal shocked some legal experts,
who described it as a "landmark" settlement for college sports.

"This makes the settlement against assistant
coaches look like a Sunday-school picnic," said Sheldon E. Steinbach, a
Washington lawyer, referring to the NCAA's $54.5-million settlement in 1999
with a group of former assistant coaches whose salaries the NCAA had capped.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I hope this convinces as many Division 1 schools to change to Division 3 and
divert the scholarship money to academic standouts rather than athletic
standouts. Of course those schools who who run their athletic departments at a
profit will think otherwise.

This reminds me of a lawsuit by four UCLA basketball players who played for
UCLA for four seasons and still found themselves to be functional illiterates.
Universities must decide the real purposes of such athletic "scholarships." If
I'd have been the judge I'd have ordered that UCLA give them four more years of
college with supervised study (in windowless rooms) of 48 hours per week. I
don't think these athletes would be pleased with the outcome.

I've not read any court documents on this issue, but that doesn't mean that
I can't voice my opinion loudly (and in all the wrong places). Afterall, I
have a Ph.D.

I have comments on two issues. Apparently this settlement applies to
students on full-ride scholarships. What about students on partial
scholarship? I know that in a number of "minor" sports, a scholarship is
sometimes split and allocated to two or more students? With respect to the
additional benefits such as career development and other advisory services,
do the non-full ride students get anything? It seems to me that if benefits for the
five-year period are to be paid for by the NCAA, which governs all student
participation in D1 intercollegiate sports, then the benefits should be paid
for all students in intercollegiate athletics (ICA), even those that
receive no or only partial scholarship.

I agree with you about the
over-emphasis on sports.

I am a supporter (in principle) of intercollegiate athletes and club sports
athletes. However, sometimes I wish that schools in general would support
scholarships for students in the arts to the same extent that they supports
scholarships for students in the sports. As an example (chosen only because
I know the details, not because I think it does bad), I'll talk about my
school. My school is somewhat known for its success in the performance arts
(especially music). It provides nearly 550 full-ride scholarships for
attracting students to campus for athletic performance, and less than
$200,000 per year to attract students to campus for musical performance. And
my school sends more students to the pros in music than in sports. To my
knowledge, there are no full-ride or partial scholarships for recruiting
students to BGSU for the debate team (which has a storied history).

At my school, there aren't that many tickets sold for D1 sports events, so
the general student body ends up paying a majority of the budget for
intercollegiate sports. A few years ago I did a quick mental computation
and concluded that students were in effect required to pay more than $50 per
ticket for all home events in the money sports (FB, H, MBB, WBB) whether or
not they choose to attend most don't). We can only get non-students
attending sports events to pay $5-15 per ticket, and many are even comped
in. It has been a while since we approached a sell-out at a sporting
event. (As in interesting aside, WBB now out-draws MBB.) (As another
interesting aside, Club Rugby has been to three final fours, and students
must pay to play.)

My school is a member of the Mid-American Conference for ICA. The mid-tier
MAC is in an athletic facilities race. Many schools have built (or are
planning to build) large indoor practice facilities for outdoor sports and
fancy buildings for weight and other training. Recently, my school announced
plans to build a new basketball arena (seating capacity only 10% larger than
that of the old building), a football stadium renovation, and a Hockey arena
renovation.

I'd love to be in a position to make a financial offer to an accounting
student that would woo them from other schools in my state. I don't think
I've ever been at a school that has scholarship money targeted solely to
accounting students to attract them to campus.

There are many things out of whack in American higher education. The
emphasis on sports is only one of them.

David Albrecht

No More Study Hall?College students on welfare won’t have
to attend supervised study halls to fulfill weekly work
requirements and can pursue baccalaureate, advanced degrees, or
distance education under new, soon-to-be-released federal
regulations for the
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Program.
(The regulations, obtained by Inside Higher Ed, were briefly
available to the public last week before the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services rescinded them because of clerical
errors. A spokesman said the content will remain consistent, and
a new version will likely be available on the
Federal Registerwithin a week).
Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed, January 30, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/30/welfare

Although opposition to colleges' affirmative-action
policies runs highest in the white population, a new study suggests that it
is Asian Americans—not whites—whose chances of gaining admission to a
selective university surges after an institution is precluded from
considering applicants' ethnicity or race.

One of the study's authors, David R. Colburn, a
professor of history and former provost at the University of Florida, said
in an interview on Tuesday that the study shows "Asian Americans were
discriminated against under an affirmative-action system." Asian Americans'
share of enrollment has shot upward at selective public universities that
have been forced to abandon affirmative-action preferences, he said, and the
Asian-American population has not increased nearly enough to explain the
trend.

Meanwhile, a report on the study's findings says,
white enrollments, as a share of the student body, actually declined
slightly at the universities examined. That trend, it says, though partly
attributable to the growing diversity of the states served by the
institutions, "can hardly be satisfying" to "those who campaigned for the
elimination of affirmative action in the belief that it would advantage the
admission of white students."

Black students' share of enrollment at such
institutions generally dropped—sometimes substantially—while the picture for
Hispanic students was mixed, the researchers found.

The study, the results of which are to be published
next week in InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information
Studies, was based on an analysis of enrollment data from selective
universities in three states: California, where voters passed a 1996
referendum barring such institutions from considering applicants' race or
ethnicity; Florida, where Gov. Jeb Bush persuaded the state university
system to abandon race-conscious admissions in 2000; and Texas, where
race-conscious admissions were prohibited under a 1996 federal court
decision that remained in effect until the Supreme Court upheld the
constitutionality of such policies in 2003.

The specific institutions examined in the study,
which tracked freshman enrollment patterns from 1990 through the fall of
2005, were the University of Florida, the University of Texas at Austin, and
the University of California's campuses at Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San
Diego.

One of the study's three co-authors, Charles E.
Young Jr., was chancellor of UCLA when California's ban on
affirmative-action preferences was passed and later served as president of
the University of Florida at the time when public universities there were
barred from considering applicants' ethnicity or race. The third co-author
is Victor M. Yellen, a former director of institutional research at Florida.

People are flocking to online social networks.Facebook,
for example, claims an average of 250,000 new
registrations per day. But companies are still hunting for ways to make
these networks more useful--and profitable. In the past year, Facebook has
introduced new services aimed at taking advantage of users' online contacts
(see "Building
onto Facebook's Platform"), and Yahoo announced
plans for an
e-mail service that shares data with
social-networking sites. (See "Yahoo's
Plan for a Smarter In-Box.") Now a company calledDelver,
which presented atDemoearlier this week, is working on a search engine that
uses social-network data to return personalized results from the larger Web.

Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver, says that the site
connects information about a user's social network with Web search results,
"so you are searching the Web through the prism of your social graph." He
explains that a person begins a search at Delver by typing in her name.
Delver then crawls social-networking websites for widely available data
about the user--such as a public
LinkedIn profile--and builds a network of
associated institutions and individuals based on that information. When the
user enters a search query, results related to, produced by, or tagged by
members of her social network are given priority. Lower down are results
from people implicitly connected to the user, such as those relating to
friends of friends, or people who attended the same college as the user.
Finally, there may be some general results from the Web at the bottom. The
consequence, says Agmon, is that each user gets a different set of results
from a given query, and a set quite different from those delivered by
Google.

"We have no intention of competing with the Googles
of the world, because Google is doing a very good job of indexing the Web
and bringing you theWikipediapage of every search query you're looking for," says
Agmon. He says that Delver will free general search queries such as "New
York" or "screensaver" from the heavy search-engine optimization that tends
to make those kinds of queries return generic, ad-heavy results on Google.
"[As a user], you're always thinking, how can I trick Google into bringing
me the real results rather than the commercial results?" Agmon says. "With
this engine, we don't need to trick it at all. You can go back to these very
naive and simple queries because the results come from your network. Your
network is not trying to optimize results; they just publish or bookmark
pages which they find interesting." As a consequence, the results lean
toward user-generated content and items tagged through sites such as del.icio.us.

Webster's New Millennium Dictionary defines social
networking as: "the use of a Web site to connect with people who share
personal or professional interests, place of origin, education at a
particular school, etc."

This broad definition needs a narrower focus for
anyone deciding to incorporate a social networking site on their own Web
site or starting a new site. Other than the closed/private and open/public
differences, how else do ISNs and ESNs differ?

Amount of Disclosure: ISN members - especially in
a corporate or professional network - will usually be more circumspect when
completing profiles and postings. On the other hand, ESN members may well
embellish qualifications, accomplishments, adventures and degrees as their
career is not on the line.

Objectives: Associations or not-for-profits may
use social networking sites to attract and increase membership. Companies
may use ISNs to retain employees by creating a community. Companies can also
use ESNs to attract advertisers interested in targeting specific products
and services.

Focus: ISNs are more specific in their focus while
ESNs target broad groups of people to join. Once joined, ESNs work hard at
directing people to more specific groups or niches of further interest to
the user. Think of it as an ISN within an ESN.

According to e-Marketer's December 2007 Social
Network Marketing: Ad Spending and Usage report, social networking is an
activity that 37 percent of U.S. adult Internet users and 70 percent of
online teens engage in every month, and the numbers continue to grow.
eMarketer projects that by 2011, one-half of online adults and 84 percent of
online teens in the U.S. will use social networking. It's no wonder that
corporate America is embracing the social networking phenomenon!

Question
What law schools in the U.S. never give a second thought to passage rates on the
Bar Examination?

Would-be lawyers in Wisconsin who have challenged
the state’s policy of allowing graduates of state law schools to practice law
without passing the state’s bar exam will have their day in court after all, the
Associated Press reported. A federal appeals court has reinstated a lawsuit
challenging the practice, which apparently is unique in the United States.
Katherine Mangan, "Appeals Court Reinstates Lawsuit Over Wisconsin's Bar-Exam
Exemption," Chronicle of Higher Education, January 29, 2008 ---
Click Here

Question
How are the oligopolies of prestigious European business schools and global
universities changing?Hint 1: It's largely a function of gaming for media rankings
Hint 2: Those top ranking programs are seriously cutting into the U.S.
market for prestige colleges of business

TIME was when INSEAD in Fontainebleau, near Paris,
was the top business school in Europe, with no competition. In Europe the
only schools that could call themselves rivals were the London Business
School (LBS) and IMD in Switzerland. Its one-year MBA course is still famous
for the experience of mixing with students from a wide range of countries.
Internationally, it holds its head up with the top American schools, and its
33,000 alumni form a powerful network covering the top echelons of global
business. But now the heat is on for INSEAD, as a crowd of rivals has come
forward, including a new, generously funded school in Berlin.

HEC, the original French business school in Paris,
with a proud 127-year history, now tops the latest Financial Times ranking
of European schools, ahead of both INSEAD and LBS. In another ranking of the
world's top 100 business schools by the Economist Intelligence Unit* (a
sister company of The Economist), INSEAD comes 17th. That puts it behind
seven other European institutions, including Barcelona's IESE, Madrid's
Instituto de Empresa and Cambridge University's Judge Business School, which
all make it into the top 15.

One INSEAD insider says that the school is
“rattled” by the latest rankings and by all the new competition. The school
is obsessed with rankings, says an employee. Much management time goes on
“gaming” the ratings to ensure a good score. The EIU rankings are based on
student surveys asking about career openings, the overall educational
experience, salary effect and networking potential. Those of the Financial
Times look mainly at return on investment, in terms of the boost to a
salary. Soumitra Dutta, dean of external relations at INSEAD, says that
rankings “are not always most helpful” because of all the different
methodologies used. In other words, they are a nuisance.

This week 30 executives from 13 different countries
are entering their fourth month of the first executive MBA course at the
European School of Management and Technology in Berlin (ESMT). Germany only
got round to founding an international business school in 2002, and started
small MBA classes two years ago. To be sure, a class of 30 students is puny
compared with the 920 going through INSEAD this year. INSEAD's joint campus
(it runs a parallel school in Singapore), has 143 teachers compared with
ESMT's 22. But the infant German institution has the financial support to
triple the size of its faculty within five years. Its backers span the
alphabet of leading firms from Allianz and Axel Springer through BMW, Bayer
and Bosch to Siemens and ThyssenKrupp. The president of ESMT is Lars-Hendrik
Röller, a former INSEAD professor with a distinguished academic career on
both sides of the Atlantic. He says the strength of the new school will be
business and its interaction with technology and public policy.

INSEAD also had money on its mind when it appointed
a new dean in 2005. Frank Brown is an American and a former partner in
PricewaterhouseCoopers. A former INSEAD board member, his brief as dean was
to raise more finance for a school that has always struggled against the
financial heft of the Americans. So far, says Mr Dutta, he has already
raised some €170m of the €200m which the school wants to find by 2010.

INSEAD, LBS and IMD face new threats beyond uppity
rivals like the Spanish schools and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge
(both late to embrace business, but rich and rising fast). The forthcoming
harmonisation of European university education, under what is known as the
Bologna Accord, could also upset them. Europe's universities will soon all
adopt a uniform Anglo-Saxon system of bachelors, masters and doctoral
degrees. This is designed to produce greater movement of students around
Europe, and has already generated 299 new management masters degree courses
that students can follow straight after an undergraduate degree. It was
HEC's success in these courses which helped it beat all the other business
schools in the FT rankings. INSEAD and the other established

Top 100 Global Universities

An August 2006 article in the international edition
of Newsweek evaluated universities from around the world on their "globalness",
providing a ranked list of the top 100. We're pleased to see that one of
their criteria was the size of the library.

We evaluated schools on some of the measures used
in well-known rankings published by Shanghai Jiaotong University and the
Times of London Higher Education Survey. Fifty percent of the score came
from equal parts of three measures used by Shanghai Jiatong: the number
of highly-cited researchers in various academic fields, the number of
articles published in Nature and Science, and the number of articles
listed in the ISI Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities indices. Another
40 percent of the score came from equal parts of four measures used by
the Times: the percentage of international faculty, the percentage of
international students, citations per faculty member (using ISI data),
and the ratio of faculty to students. The final 10 percent came
from library holdings (number of volumes).

The top 10 were:

1. Harvard University
2. Stanford University
3. Yale University
4. California Institute of Technology
5. University of California at Berkeley
6. University of Cambridge
7. Massachusetts Institute Technology
8. Oxford University
9. University of California at San Francisco
10. Columbia University

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign came
in 48th, behind other big ten universities such as Michigan (11), U Chicago
(20), Wisconsin (28), Minnesota (30), Northwestern (35), and Penn State
(40). Others from the Big 10 that made the list of 100 included Michigan
State (62), and Purdue (86).

Note: You may also be interested in reading the
Times of London's analysis of the "Top
100 Universities", worldwide. By their
accounting, the University of Illinois ranked 58 in 2005 and 78 in 2006.
According to this listing, the top universities are:

Allegations of Conflict of Interest for Top Business School Admissions
OfficersThree senior admissions officials of prominent American
universities sit on an advisory board of a Japanese company that helps
applicants in Japan get into top M.B.A. programs in the United States —
including programs at their universities. The officials confirmed
their involvement and that they receive a free annual trip to meetings in Japan
for their services, whichare boasted
about on the Japanese company’s Web site. One of the officials said that
there is also pay involved, but declined to say how much. One official said he
couldn’t answer questions about his pay. And one official denied being paid
except for the free trip to Japan.
Scott Jaschik, "New Conflict of Interest Allegations," Inside Higher Ed,
January 30, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/30/agos

How can teachers/researchers gain collegiate administrative
skills?Many professors worry that colleges
these days prefer a professional class of administrators to
promoting faculty members. In turn, many administrators complain
that faculty members — however good at their teaching and
research — may lack key skills for more responsibility. A new
program at Simmons College —
one of six master’s institutions receiving grantsTuesday to promote “faculty career
flexibility” — aims to provide professors with a path to pick up
administrative skills, without just adding on to their
workloads. The grants are being awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation, which last year
awarded similar grantsto research
universities.
Scott Jaschik, "Promoting Career Flexibility," Inside Higher Ed,
January 30, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/30/sloan

This student-sponsored "art
show" may draw thousandsThe College of William & Mary, of late
the site of debates over
social issues and the First Amendment,has affirmed the right of students to
sponsor an art show by sex workers. The
Sex Workers’ Art Showfeatures
visual and performing arts by strippers, prostitutes, porn stars
and others. While the show tends to tour college campuses, some
have suggested that William & Mary might be better off finding
another venue in the area for the show, scheduled for the campus
on February 4. Gene R. Nichol, president of the college,
issued a statementin which he said
that while he wished that students hadn’t scheduled the event,
it would be wrong for him to censor it. “There are powerful
reasons that colleges have student-funded and student-governed
speaker series. They help assure a robust program of expression
on campus. Censoring them because administrators disagree with a
performance’s content contradicts values residing at the core of
the American university,” he said. Inside Higher Ed, January 30, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/30/qt

Certain instances of misuse or
excessive use of the section 6421 fuels credit.

An individual or group may not avoid paying
their fair share of taxes by making "frivolous" legal arguments. The
IRS publicizes these frivolous claims to help taxpayers understand
the law and avoid penalties.

Continued in article

Question
Does it pay to evade taxes and, if so, why don't more people do it?

All the rich countries are successful in raising
sizable amounts of revenue from taxes with only a rather little tax evasion.
Tax avoidance is the use of legal means to reduce taxes, whereas tax evasion
uses illegal means. The federal government of the US raises almost 20
percent of American GDP through taxes on personal and business income,
capital gains, estates, and the sale of gasoline and some other goods. The
estimates from the 2001 IRS National Research Program indicate that the
percent of income not reported is quite low for wages and salaries, but
rises to over 50 percent for farm income, and about 40 percent for business
income. Income tax payments overall are under reported by about 13 percent.
What determines the degree of tax evasion?

If taxpayers responded only to the expected cost of
evading taxes, evasion would be far more widespread. The reason is that only
about 7 percent of all tax returns are audited (over a 7 year period), and
typically the penalty on under reported income is only about 20 percent of
the taxes owed. Virtually no one is sent to jail simply for evading taxes
unless that evasion is on a very large scale, or involves massive fraud. If
a person were to evade $1,000 in taxes, his expected gain would be
0.93x$1000 -0.07x$200 (=$1000/5) = $916. On these considerations alone, he
should not hesitate to evade paying the $1,000, and presumably much more.

To be sure, the expected gain is not the right
criterion since most taxpayers would be risk averse regarding audits and
punishments, especially if there is some chance of much greater than the
average punishment or likelihood of an audit. However, if the expected gain
from evading $1,000 were $916, the degree of risk aversion would have to be
huge, far higher than the risk aversion that is embodied in pricing of
assets, for risk to explain why there is so little tax evasion.

This is not to say that possible punishments have
no affect on the amount of tax evasion. Compliance rates are much higher
when governments have independent evidence on a person's income since then
the probability of audit when he under reports his income is much higher
than when they do not have this information. For example, income from
independent consulting to companies is better reported than tips on
earnings, or than the incomes of farmers and other small business owners
because employers report how much they paid to independent consultants,
whereas no one reports how much they paid in tips, or how much they bought
from a local store. A PhD study in progress at the University of Chicago by
Oscar Vela also shows that persons in occupations where integrity is a more
important determinant of success, such as law or medicine, are less likely
to evade taxes. Presumably, any publicity that an individual in these
occupations was convicted of tax evasion would damage his reputation and
earnings.

Vela finds that considerations of reputation, along
with more traditional variables in the tax evasion literature do help
explain how much evasion occurs for different types of income. These
variables include the likelihood of audits that varies for different classes
of taxpayers, punishments for those audited, marital status (not
surprisingly, married persons are less likely to evade taxes), the marginal
tax rate, and the ease with which governments can match reported incomes
with independent evidence on incomes, such as from 1040 and 1099 tax forms,

Note that tax avoidance as well as tax evasion
tends to rise as the marginal tax rate increases. That is, with higher tax
rates, individuals and businesses are both more likely not to report some of
their income to the tax authorities, and also to search harder for ways to
reduce how much of their income they are obligated to report. This implies,
for example, that flattening the income tax structure would increase the
amount of personal income reported to tax authorities because both the
amount of evasion and the avoidance of the personal income tax would be
reduced.

However, audits, punishments, and the other
deterrence variables mentioned in the previous paragraphs do not fully
explain why there is not much more tax evasion. I believe it is necessary to
recognize that most people believe they have a duty, moral or otherwise, to
report their taxable income more or less honestly. I intentionally say "more
or less honestly" because a little cheating on taxes is usually considered
to be ok, as long as it does not go too far. Individuals might not pay
social security taxes on their payments to workers who clean their houses,
and they might pay a mason in cash because he then gives them a lower price,
but these same persons would be very reluctant to engage in large-scale tax
evasion.

Similarly, most people do not believe it is moral
to steal money even when there is little chance they will be found out, and
they feel obligated to obey many other laws, even when that entails
inconvenience and cost to themselves. There would be considerably more crime
if individuals only obeyed laws when the expected cost of being caught,
adjusted for risk, exceeded the benefits from disobeying these laws. To some
extent, people obey many laws, including tax laws, because most other
persons are doing the same. If so, their behavior might change radically if
they lost confidence that others would pay their taxes and obey other laws.

Clearly, morality about obeying laws does not apply
to all types of taxes, or all laws-people often cross a street when the
light is red, do not stop at stop signs when riding their bikes, and do not
report much of their tips. Moreover, in many countries of Latin America,
Africa, and Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe, individuals do not
even feel much obligation to pay ordinary income and other taxes. They evade
except when they expect the chances of being caught are high, as with
businesses paying value added taxes. These countries are unable to raise
substantial amounts from taxes on personal incomes or businesses except when
marginal tax rates are low. Instead they rely greatly on value added and
other more difficult to evade taxes.

Becker presents persuasive evidence that the amount
of tax evasion varies, as one would expect in a rational-choice model of
taxpaying, with variance in the private costs and private benefits of
evasion. I am inclined to believe that the private costs are higher than he
suggests, which if true would mean that more tax compliance can be
attributed to rational fear of punishment than he suggests and less to
taxpayers' feeling a moral duty to pay taxes. For example, the civil
penalties for tax evasion are quite severe (the fraud penalty is 100 percent
of the amount of taxes evaded), and anyone charged with civil or criminal
tax evasion will incur heavy legal and accounting expenses in defending
against the charge. Although the audit rate is low, it is not random, but
rather is higher for those taxpayers who are in the best position to evade
taxes without being caught or whose tax returns raise a red flag because of
unusually high deductions or other suspicious circumstances. And once one
has been caught evading taxes, one can expect the rate of future audits of
one's returns to be high. While it is true that underpayment of taxes is
rarely prosecuted criminally, even when deliberate, criminal prosecution is
likely if the tax evader takes steps to conceal the evasion, as by never
filing a tax return, keeping phony books, or forging evidence of deductions.
Moreover, the government does occasionally prosecute even small fry.

. . .

The general question that Becker raises of the
moral costs of committing crime is a fascinating one. I would be inclined to
search as hard as possible for nonmoral costs before concluding that
morality is a major motivator of behavior, especially with regard to crimes,
like tax evasion, that do not have an identifiable victim. In the case of
many crimes, the benefits to most people of perpetrating them would be so
slight (and often zero or even negative) that sanctions play only a small
role in bringing about compliance; enforcement costs needn't be high in
order to deter when nonenforcement benefits are low. Some examples: the
demand for crack cocaine among white people (including cocaine addicts)
appears to be very small. Both altruism and fear deter most people from
attempting crimes of violence, quite apart from expected punishment costs.
The vast majority of men do not have a sexual interest in prepubescent
children. Well-to-do people often have excellent substitutes for crime: any
person of means can procure legal substitutes for illegal drugs (for
example, Prozac for cocaine, Valium for heroin). Fear of injury deters most
people from driving recklessly or while drunk. People who have no taxable
income are incapable of evading income tax. People who do have taxable
income can obtain benefits from evading it, but the costs of evasion are, as
I have emphasized, nonnegligible, so there is widespread compliance along
with a good deal of evasion. I would therefore expect differences across
countries in tax evasion to be related more to differences in penalties,
collection methods, and so forth than to differences in morality. Americans
may exhibit higher tax compliance than Italians, but Americans are not a
more moral people than Italians.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I inclined to think that more people evade taxes than Becker and Posner suggest,
although this evasion has declined due to added reporting of revenues,
particularly 1099 forms for miscellaneous income. In the United States, the IRS
estimated in 2007 that Americans owed $345 billion more than they paid, or about
14% of federal revenues for FY2007. But these estimates are very soft numbers
based largely on intense audits of a miniscule proportion of taxpayers filing
returns ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Evasion

Faculty members gnash their teeth and wring their
hands when students plagiarize. They cry for offenders to be punished. But
now an online text-search program directed at their own work suggests that
professors in biomedicine may be just as guilty of paper-writing sins.

More than 70,000 article abstracts appeared
disturbingly similar to other published work when scanned by a new search
program, researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
report in the current issue of Nature. The researchers examined 2,600 of
these abstracts by hand and found 73 instances of what appears to be
outright plagiarism: one author stealing another's work.

Many more examples existed that looked like double
publishing, in which a researcher publishes identical papers in different
journals.

Mounir Errami, one of the Texas scientists, said
that as a result of this work, a "big shot" at "one of the most prestigious
universities in the United States" was now under investigation by a top-tier
journal in which he apparently published a plagiarized article. He declined
to give further details because of the preliminary stage of the inquiry.

The search program, called eTBLAST, looked for
similar language among papers listed in Medline, the online database of
abstracts from biomedical journals. Mr. Errami, and his Nature co-author,
Harold R. Garner Jr., turned it loose on seven million abstracts tagged by
Medline as related to other literature in the database.

After getting 70,000 suspicious hits, the
researchers began the slower process of checking each abstract manually; it
has taken them months to churn through the 2,600 items. They have placed the
entire set of 70,000 abstracts in a public database called Déjà Vu (
http://spore.swmed.edu/dejavu ), hoping the scientific community will
now pitch in with some public peer review.

The detection program is sorely needed, said Mr.
Errami. Apart from violating ethical norms and skewing research efforts,
repeat publication could actually be dangerous to patients. If a clinical
trial appears more than once, it would appear that more patients have
undergone an experimental treatment than truly have. "Then you instill a
false sense of safety for the drug," says Mr. Errami, an instructor at Texas
Southwestern's division of translational research.

Double Trouble

Researchers originally developed the
text-comparison program to allow scientists to scan the vast medical
literature and find work closely related to their own.

But Jonathan D. Wren, who had been a graduate
student in Mr. Garner's laboratory, suggested in 2006 that eTBLAST could
check for duplicate publication after a manuscript he was considering for a
journal turned out to be oddly familiar. Mr. Wren, who is an associate
editor of Bioinformatics and a scientist at the Oklahoma Medical Research
Foundation, recalls that when he sent the manuscript for peer review, one
reader responded by saying, "I've reviewed this paper before." Mr. Wren and
other editors of Bioinformatics now use eTBLAST routinely, he told
The Chronicle.

Journals' policies forbid repeat publication and
plagiarism, but there are gray areas. In papers that build upon one another,
the sections describing the experimental methods or the background
information are often almost identical.

In the 1980s, I went on a tour of Times Square led
by Women Against Pornography. In one bookshop, all the literature was
carefully labeled and indexed by subject; one category, irresistibly, was
called "professors." To my great disappointment, prof-porn turned out to be
pictures of orgies in which all the participants were wearing glasses. I had
something of the same feeling of letdown reading Carol Gilligan's new novel,
Kyra (Random House).

Not that it is pornographic, I hasten to add.
Kyra is nothing if not high-minded, and it is tastefully erotic in a
glum, Bergmanesque way. But Gilligan (see
related article) has dressed up standard romantic
fiction — with its fantasies of wish fulfillment and revenge — in a thickly
padded coat of learned allusions and erudite lectures. I might call Kyra
"professorial chick lit," except that the heroine of chick lit is always
lovably flawed and funny, and Gilligan's narrator is perfect and humorless,
not only a brilliant and acclaimed lecturer at A-list conference venues from
Cambridge to Vienna, but also, as her lover tells her more than once,
"incredibly beautiful." Kyra also knows binaries like female/male,
private/public, inside/outside, and commitment/independence. That's a lot of
baggage for a first novel to carry, and Kyra buckles under the weight
of Gilligan's ambitions.

Why write a novel after a splendid career as a
social psychologist at Harvard and New York Universities, and the University
of Cambridge? Gilligan first made her academic reputation in 1982 with the
enormously influential but controversial In a Different Voice:
Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Harvard University Press),
which argued that girls and boys had a different moral development and
ethical concerns. For girls, she maintained, entering adolescence meant
sacrificing an authentic self and genuine voice to the urgent need for
relationships, thus developing a female ethics of care more complex and
conflicted than a male one. In addition to a small number of interviews with
12-year-old boys and girls, Gilligan drew many of her examples from
literature (she had majored in English at Swarthmore College), including the
work of Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Margaret Drabble, George Eliot, Robert
Frost, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Mary McCarthy, Toni
Morrison, Shakespeare, Stendhal, and Virginia Woolf. In her most recent
psychological text, The Birth of Pleasure (Knopf, 2002), Gilligan
argued that tragic love stories are patriarchal, defining love as loss and
pain, whereas a female-centered love story would allow both protagonists the
happy ending of equality.

In 2002, Gilligan also wrote a dramatic adaptation
of The Scarlet Letter, produced at Shakespeare & Co., in Lenox,
Mass., a tale that illustrated her idea that the tragic love story is a
rigid and inflexible genre that denies men and women pleasure by insisting
on obedience to patriarchal codes. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's treatment, the
protagonist Hester Prynne believes in a future that "would establish the
whole relation between men and women on a surer ground of mutual happiness,"
but Hawthorne refuses such a utopian ending. In Gilligan's play, Hester's
daughter, Pearl, speaks magically from the 21st century to describe how a
happy ending can be achieved by contemporary feminists, but that is a
didactic postscript to the characters' dilemma.

Continued in article

Many Colleges Turn Their Ears Toward CongressHigher education leaders have long had a love-hate
relationship with earmarks. On the one hand, they’re regularly derided by
critics as fostering the waste of tax dollars and encouraging a sometimes
secretive circumvention of peer review in ways that do not necessarily produce
the best science. But the fact remains that colleges and the research
initiatives they house have been among the key recipients of the dollars, which
some argue level the research playing field for less-prestigious institutions.
Public university presidents regularly pass through Washington to lobby their
members of Congress for the grants; on Monday alone, two who met with Inside
Higher Ed’s editors boasted that that was a primary reason for their visits to
town. Although many members of Congress defend the grants as a way for them to
reward constituents who do good work but are disadvantaged for a variety of
reasons in traditional competitions for funds, the grants have come under
increasing scrutiny from budget hawks and “good government” types who see the
earmarks as wasteful. Congress has made several changes in law and policy aimed
at improving disclosure of the grants, with the goal of embarrassing lawmakers
into providing fewer of them. But that strategy appears to have failed miserably
so far; in its 2008 spending bills, Congress funded 11,000 noncompetitive
projects worth $14 billion — half the amount delivered in 2007, but about 1,000
more grants than awarded that year.
Doug Lederman, 'Bush on Earmarks: Tough Words, Little Meaning," Inside Higher
Ed, January 29, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/29/bush

Question
Did the Motion Picture Association of America Lie on Purpose?

A week ago
today, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) issued
what had to bea
hugely embarrassing news release
acknowledging that an aggressively promoted and widely cited
research report commissioned by the MPAA in 2005 significantly
overstated the Internet-based peer-to-peer piracy of college
students: “The 2005 study had incorrectly concluded that 44
percent of the motion picture industry’s domestic losses were
attributable to piracy by college students. The 2007 study will
report that number to be approximately 15 percent.” The MPAA
release attributes the bad data to an “isolated error,” adding
that it takes the error seriously and plans to hire an
independent reviewer “to validate” the numbers in a forthcoming
edition of an updated report. We should applaud the MPAA for
going public with a painful press release about what some have
tagged the “300 percent error.” Unfortunately, the MPAA has yet
to release the actual reports that generated either the 44
percent or 15 percent claims about the role of college students
in digital piracy; the public data are limited to PowerPoint
graphics in PDF format on the association’s web site. Perhaps as
part of its efforts to validate the numbers in the new report
the MPAA will also make public the complete document, not just
the summary graphics. (Academics do know something about peer
review.)
Kenneth C. Greene, "The Movie Industry’s 300% Error," Inside
Higher Ed, January 29, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/01/29/green

College leaders have been criticized in some
quarters for not taking conflicts of interest seriously. The largest
association representing higher education took a first pass at remedying
that Friday with a working paper aimed at helping campus administrators deal
with real and perceived financial conflicts.

The
“Working Paper on Conflict of Interest”was
prepared by a panel of college presidents, association heads and lawyers
assembled by ACE after a September meeting
on conflicts of interest. The council had gathered higher education
officials to discuss whether and how they should respond, broadly, to the
perception that conflicts of interest were rife or spreading in higher
education. The conversation and the intensified attention to financial
conflicts were prompted largely by 2007’s various inquiries into the student
loan industry, and by the perception that some of the same conflicts of
interest inherent in the financial aid world
exist in other college and university operations.

After the September meeting, David Ward, the
departing president of the American Council on Education, said he expected
the working group he appointed to create not a list of things to do and not
to do, but a list of “diagnostic questions” about potential conflicts,
framed in such a way that “if the answer to [the questions] was no, that’s
an indication that you might have a problem” with a particular situation.
ACE’s desire, he said, was to give campus officials a document to
“illuminate principles” that should guide them as they confront arrangements
that might seem to fall into a gray area.

The document released just before 5 p.m. on Friday,
which was produced by an eight-member panel whose members are listed below,
hews closely to that approach. Because colleges have such diverse
structures, cultures and missions, the panel writes in its introduction,
“[t]here is thus likely no one conflict of interest policy that would fit
all of the institutions. Accordingly, the purpose of this statement is not
to prescribe a single approach to conflicts management. Rather, this
statement aims to provide tools that each institution may use to inform its
own thinking about these issues.”

The paper starts from the premise that colleges
must, to meet their many needs while remaining financially viable, engage in
partnerships and financial arrangements with outside entities, including
businesses, that may create real or perceived conflicts of interest. And it
notes that the environment in which the legality and, importantly, the
morality of those arrangements will be judged can change over time, as some
financial aid officials believe they did in the student loan world over the
last few years.

“Transactions once deemed acceptable may now be the
subject of questions about whether, for example, they are at arm’s length,”
the panel writes.

While the paper generally avoids dictating what
colleges should and should not do in specific instances, it does lay out a
set of “basic precepts that are universal or nearly universal among higher
education institutions” to “form a baseline for management of conflict of
interest.” Foremost among these precepts is the idea that a faculty or staff
member or trustee must disclose “known significant financial interests” in
an outside organization with which the institution is affiliated, and that
institutional officials should review those disclosures and have “procedures
to address identified conflicts.”

That is as far as the committee went in laying out
a common view of how colleges and universities should approach conflicts of
interest; the rest of the paper lays out a long set of questions that
institutions might ask in reviewing various situations, including their
relationships with vendors ("Under what circumstances, if any, is it
appropriate for an administrator, faculty member, or trustee to own stock or
have another financial interest in a vendor?"); their conflicts policies
("Under what circumstances should institutional policy give the persons
disclosing conflicts of interest discretion to decide whether a particular
interest needs to be disclosed?"); and institutional conflicts involving
commercial arrangements ("Does the transaction entail the actuality or
perception that the institution is profiting to the detriment of students or
other constituents?")

Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of
the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers,
said he found it “more than a little surprising that the paper doesn’t
clearly enough recommend avoidance of actual or apparent conflicts where
that is at all practicable, and appears to view disclosure — even of
avoidable and more appropriately avoided conflicts — as meeting an adequate
threshold of ethical conduct.”

MySpace's Leaked Photos More Popular
Than Sweeney ToddThe
17-gigabyte file containing
half-of-million photos pillaged from
MySpace accounts made the Pirate
Bay's top-ten list of most popular
downloads over the weekend, beating
out pirated copies of No
Country For Old Men,
Sweeney Todd
and the sci-fi flick I Am
Legend. Sunday afternoon
the file -- compiled using a
still-unacknowledged holein MySpace's
architecture that exposed photos in
private profiles -- was the 9th
most popular download on the torrent
site, with over 6,700 downloads in
progress.On Monday, though, the
file's popularity plummeted as the
first round of downloaders completed
their transfers and found that the
photos -- a mix of images from
public and private profiles -- just
weren't that interesting.
Kevin Poulsen, Wired News,
January 28, 2008 ---
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/01/myspaces-leaked.html

In all 20 countries except the Netherlands, the tax
burden has increased since 1975, though in some countries, such as the
United States, the increase has been slight--only 2.6 percent. In others,
however--Denmark Greece, Italy, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, and Turkey--it
has exceeded 10 percent. Spain's increase has been the greatest, at 18.3
percent, followed by Italy's at 17.3 percent and Turkey's at 16.5 percent.

The OECD report explains that the increase in tax
burden is due to increased revenues from "direct" taxes--income (including
payroll) and corporate taxes--rather than from "indirect" taxes such as VAT,
sales taxes, and other excise taxes. Even though most countries, including
the United States, have cut income and corporate tax rates, the cuts have
been more than offset by increases in income and corporate profits; of
course the cuts may have helped generate those increases. The OECD favors
indirect taxes because they tax only consumption, whereas direct taxes tax
income that is saved, and thus discourage investment.

Continued in article

"Why Are Tax Burdens So Different in Different Developed Countries?" by Nobel
Laureate Gary Becker, The Becker-Posner Blog, January 27, 2008 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

The burden of taxes to a country depends not only
on the fraction of its gross domestic product GDP that are collected as tax
revenue –the data shown in Posner's chart- but on many other factors as
well. Since my comment is brief I will confine my discussion to the link
between tax burdens, the level of government spending, and the structure and
incidence of taxes.

It is not possible to separate tax burdens from
government spending. Obviously, as Posner makes clear, how governments spend
their tax revenues makes an enormous difference to the functioning of an
economy. In addition, however, the level of government spending also affects
the tax burden. If spending exceeds the amount collected in taxes, the
excess spending must be financed by an increase in government debt (I ignore
inflationary printing of money). Interest payments on the higher government
debt have to be financed by higher taxes in the future, so the full tax
burden is determined not by tax revenues alone but also by government
spending. Senator McCain has justified his initial opposition to the Bush
tax cuts by indicating that they were not combined with cuts in government
spending -in fact, just the opposite occurred.

The tax burden depends in addition on the type of
taxes used and their structure. What economists call the "excess burden" is
measured by the difference between the cost to those paying taxes and the
revenue collected by government. The excess burden is zero for a head tax,
which is an equal tax per person, since the amounts paid to governments from
such a tax equals the cost to taxpayers. Taxes on income do have an excess
burden because they distort taxpayers' decisions toward greater leisure. The
higher the marginal tax rate, the greater are these and other distortions
induced in labor supply, and hence the greater the excess burden of income
taxes.

To reduce distortions, broader and flatter taxes
are better because then marginal tax rates are lower. Rudy Giuliani has
proposed a flat and rather broad income tax with a highest marginal tax rate
of only 30 percent to complement the present complicated income tax system.
Consumption taxes, such as value added taxes, have lower excess burdens than
income taxes. Like an income tax, a general tax on consumption does
discourage work in favor of leisure essentially because individuals can
avoid both consumption and income taxes by taking additional leisure since
leisure is not taxed. However, an income tax has other distortions as well
since income is both taxed when received, and also taxed again when the
savings out of income produces additional income. Income taxes in effect tax
savings twice, while consumption taxes only tax savings once, when they are
spent. In order to reduce this double taxation of savings from income taxes,
the US and other countries allow families to save in ways that are free of
income taxes until the savings are spent, such as through saving with IRAs.

There is a natural tendency to assume that the
burden of taxes falls on persons or companies that mail the tax checks into
the government. To show why this is generally false, consider a 10 percent
tax on capital that initially reduces returns on capital from say 8 percent
to 7.2 percent. This initial impact is clearly on owners of this capital,
who are generally wealthier than the average individual. Over time, however,
the capital stock would fall because companies reduce their investments in
reaction to the lowering of after-tax returns on investments due to the
capital tax. As the capital stock falls, the after-tax return would begin to
increase because the productivity of capital is higher when capital is
scarcer relative to labor. The capital stock would continue to fall
essentially until after-tax returns climb back up to the 8 percent level
they were at before the tax on capital was imposed.

Since studies confirm that in the long run owners
of capital get about the same rate of return that they would have without
any taxes on capital, who then pays the capital tax in the long run? The
answer is not capital but labor because wages and earnings are lower when
workers have less capital to work with. Owners of capital continue to send
in the checks to pay a capital tax, but the negative response of investments
to a capital tax shifts the burden of a capital tax away from capital to
labor. That eventually labor pays a tax on capital even though it is placed
on capital explains why economists generally oppose long-term taxes on
capital even though in the short run capital taxes have many desirable
properties. Investment tax credits, accelerated depreciation, and low taxes
on capital gains are some of the ways that the effective long run tax on
capital is reduced toward zero.

Late last year, The New York Review of
Books ran a full-page advertisement fairly glowing with the warmth of the
enthusiasm it projected for work of Bob Avakian. In case that name does not
ring a bell, Bob Avakian is Chairman of the Central Committee of the
Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. Once upon a time, Avakian was a student
of Stanley Fish at the University of California at Berkeley; but amidst all
the excitement of the late 1960s, the poetry of Milton could not compete
with the slogans coming out of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in
China, and so a leader of the American masses emerged, even if the masses
themselves didn’t notice.

The NYRB ad praised Avakian’s combination
of “an unsparing critique of the history and current direction of American
society with a sweeping view of world history and the potential for
humanity.” It called upon readers to “engage” with his work. As it happens,
I was once in a punk rock band with a former Avakianite. (This was back when
one of the party’s slogans was “Revolution in the ‘80s – Go For It!”) Having
thus already had the opportunity to (as they say) “engage” with Avakian’s
work, I will testify that he is, at the very least, prolific and capable of
extensive discourse. Nearly all of his writings are based on speeches to the
party, and they do go on a bit.

In any case, the content of the full-page
proclamation was much less interesting, all in all, than the list of people
endorsing it. Among them were a few prominent academics. Cornel West was one
of them. Members of the Harvard faculty were among the signatories.
Ubiquitous cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek has recently added his name to an
online version. The list also includes famous entertainers such as Public
Enemy rapper Chuck D and Ricky Lee Jones, the folk-rock chanteuse. (The text
and the most recently updated set of signatories can now be found here.)

Without quite endorsing the RCP slogan
“Mao More Than Ever,” all of them had “come away from encounters with
Avakian provoked and enriched in our own thinking.” Or so the text of the ad
put it.

In the weeks since it appeared, a few
friends who knew of my longstanding fascination with the Chairman Bob
phenomenon asked about the New York Review ad. They were surprised to see
it, and wondered whether all these people had actually taken up the cause of
Avakianism.

My best guess, rather, was that very few
of the signatories had read much Avakian. The abundance and verbosity of his
pamphlets would exceed the stamina of any but the most disciplined of
revolutionary intellectuals. What probably happened, I surmised, was that
party cadres had pointed out various anti-Bush statements by Avakian in
order to harvest a bunch of signatures from people who were angered by the
course of recent history.

Update on Free Open Sharing of
Knowledge by Colleges and Universities
"Professors on YouTube, Take 2," by Jeffrey R. Young , Chronicle of
Higher Education, January 29, 2008 ---
Click Here

Since writing about how
professors are finding celebrity on YouTube, several people
wrote in to point us to other efforts to offer lecture videos
online. So here are a couple of more, with some updates on what
they are up to:

* Research Channel: This
non-profit consortium of colleges and universities broadcasts
video of campus lectures and presentations in a variety of
formats. Its largest reach comes from its satellite and cable-TV
channel, which reaches more than 30-million homes in the U.S.
But the group has long had
a Web presence as well, and its leaders say the online
audience is growing rapidly. Amy Philipson, executive director
of Research Channel, says to look for the channel to offer its
videos on YouTube soon. And she says they've recently set up a
page on iTunesU, the educational section of Apple's iTunes
Store.

* UChannel: Princeton
University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International
Affairs runs this
Web-video network that pulls together audio and video
recordings of campus talks. The effort
started back in 2005. Donna M. Liu, director for strategic
initiatives for Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, says that
UChannel was on YouTube long before the University of
California at Berkeley set up its channel there. And the group
even offers a
Facebook application that pops lecture videos into your
online social profile.

* DoFlick: On a much,
much smaller scale, recent graduates of the University of
Maryland at College Park set up
this site featuring instructional videos about science and
engineering. One of the founders, Luis Corzo, says the site is
getting about 5,000 to 10,000 visits per month. One of the stars
of the site so far is Richard E. Berg, a professor of practice
at College Park who
produces videos of physics demonstrations.

Finally, I produced a
short video report with footage from some of lectures
featured in my previous article. What's your favorite lecture
video online?

Avast has been around for some time now, but the
uninitiated will definitely want to take a look at this rather easy to use
antivirus application. Users can select which places they want scanned using
a skinnable simple interface, and the program will start when the "Play"
button is pressed. The application can also check different email client and
instant messaging programs for viruses. This version is compatible with
computers running Windows 95 and newer.

Staying on top of one's favorite weblogs and RSS
feeds can be a time- consuming affair, but the process can be made a bit
easier with the use of RiverGate RSS Reader 1.8. This application can
retrieve content that includes weblogs and podcasts. Visitors can also use
the program to create their own customized searches. This version is
compatible with computers running Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP, and Vista.

Spamfilters are common enough, so it's nice to find
out about one with a few extra features. Bullguard Spamfilter allows users
to ban individual email addresses or complete domains, and it also includes
anti-phishing protections and integration with Outlook, Outlook Express, and
Thunderbird. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 2000,
XP, and Vista.

When Adium disappeared during development, a number
of users were quite disappointed. Those users need worry no longer, as their
development team recently released this version of this multiple-protocol,
instant messaging client. Visitors can insert their existing addresses into
the client and they will also appreciate the very sleek and elegant design
of this particular iteration. This version is compatible with computers
running Mac OS X 10.4.0 and newer.

Sedentary lifestyles associated with accelerated aging process Individuals who are physically active during their
leisure time appear to be biologically younger than those with sedentary
lifestyles, according to a report in the January 28 issue of Archives of
Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Regular exercisers have
lower rates of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, high blood
pressure, obesity and osteoporosis, according to background information in the
article. “A sedentary lifestyle increases the propensity to aging-related
disease and premature death,” the authors write. “Inactivity may diminish life
expectancy not only by predisposing to aging-related diseases but also because
it may influence the aging process itself.” Lynn F. Cherkas, Ph.D., of King’s
College London, and colleagues studied 2,401 white twins, administering
questionnaires on physical activity level, smoking habits and socioeconomic
status. The participants also provided a blood sample from which DNA was
extracted. The researchers examined the length of telomeres—repeated sequences
at the end of chromosomes—in the twins’ white blood cells (leukocytes).
Leukocyte telomeres progressively shorten over time and may serve as a marker of
biological age. PhysOrg, January 28, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news120759104.html

CDC Releases New HIV StatisticsLess Than 1% of U.S. Adults Younger than 50 Have HIV,
New HIV Prevalence Statistics Show. The CDC today reported that about one-half
of 1% of U.S. adults younger than 50 have HIV. The CDC's HIV prevalence
statistics are based on nearly 12,000 adults aged 18-49 who took part in
national health studies from 1999 to 2006. Participants were interviewed and
provided blood samples; 0.47% had HIV infection. That's similar to findings from
a 1988-1994 survey, states a CDC news release. HIV infection was more common
among men than women, and among African-Americans than whites or
Mexican-Americans. About 2.6% of African-American men and 1.5% of
African-American women were HIV positive. The data don't show how people
contracted HIV. The findings appear in January's edition of the CDC's NCHS Data
Brief.
Miranda Hitti, WebMD, January 30, 2008 ---
http://www.webmd.com/hiv-aids/news/20080129/cdc-releases-new-hiv-statistics

Accelerated head growth can predict autism before behavioral symptoms
start Children with autism have normal-size heads at birth
but develop accelerated head growth between six and nine months of age, a period
that precedes the onset of many behaviors that enable physicians to diagnose the
developmental disorder, according to new research from the University of
Washington’s Autism Center. The study also indicates that this aberrant growth
is present in children who have the early onset form of autism as well as those
later diagnosed with the regression type of the disorder, according to Sara
Webb, who led the research. “We know there are a number of risk factors for
autism, and if we can pinpoint them we have better ways of identifying children
at risk so we can get them into prevention or monitoring,” said Webb, a UW
research assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “This
abnormal or accelerated rate of head circumference growth is a biological marker
for autism. It occurs before the onset of behavioral symptoms at 12 months of
age such as a child’s failure to respond to their name, a preoccupation with
certain objects, not pointing to things, a lack of interest in other people and
the absence of babbling. “By itself, head growth is not an indicator of autism,”
she said, “because kids are going to be getting bigger and development is so
variable. However, if you notice it and some of these other symptoms, it is a
red flag to seek evaluation.” PhysOrg, January 30, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news120923947.html

Will you buy and wear an Alzheimer's prevention helmet?Nevertheless, a team of British researchers is
showcasing a bizarre-looking contraption that they say could stimulate the
healing and regeneration of brain cells using a specific wavelength of infrared
light — a category of radiation most often associated with heat energy. And
human trials on the Alzheimer's hat are even scheduled to begin this summer. Dr.
Gordon Dougal is one of the developers of the Alzheimer's hat. Dougal is also a
director of Virulite, a U.K.-based medical research company that has in the past
developed a machine to treat cold sores using the same infrared technology from
which the hat is said to derive its benefits.
"Alzheimer's Hat Draws Skepticism Experts Say Novel Invention Has Little
Scientific Base, Not Ready for Prime Time," ABC News, January 28, 2008
---
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/GadgetGuide/story?id=4202266&page=1
Jensen Comment
I'm holding out for a helmet that will download knowledge into the brain.

Lead Linked to Aging in Older Brains Could it be that the "natural" mental decline that
afflicts many older people is related to how much lead they absorbed decades
before? That's the provocative idea emerging from some recent studies, part of a
broader area of new research that suggests some pollutants can cause harm that
shows up only years after someone is exposed. The new work suggests long-ago
lead exposure can make an aging person's brain work as if it's five years older
than it really is. If that's verified by more research, it means that sharp cuts
in environmental lead levels more than 20 years ago didn't stop its widespread
effects. "We're trying to offer a caution that a portion of what has been called
normal aging might in fact be due to ubiquitous environmental exposures like
lead," says Dr. Brian Schwartz of Johns Hopkins University. "The fact that it's
happening with lead is the first proof of principle that it's possible," said
Schwartz, a leader in the study of lead's delayed effects. Other pollutants like
mercury and pesticides may do the same thing, he said. In fact, some recent
research does suggest that being exposed to pesticides raises the risk of
getting Parkinson's disease a decade or more later. Experts say such studies in
mercury are lacking.
Malcomb Ritter, Wired News, January 27, 2008 ---
Click Here

Parenting lessons don't stop toddler tantrums: study A new study shows that parent training programmes fail
to reduce behavioural problems in toddlers, suggesting that coaching on how to
rear children may be a waste of time and money. On average, behavioural problems
afflict every seventh child aged 4 to 17, previously studies have shown.
Aggressive or extremely defiant youngsters are said to have externalised
problems, while those of kids who withdraw, or suffer anxiety and depression,
are described as internalised. Troubles in childhood often have serious
personal, social and economic consequences later in life, experts say. Left
untreated, approximately 50 percent of preschoolers with behaviour problems
develop mental health problems, including depression. Besides the direct cost of
treatment, there are social costs as well: unemployment, family stress or
violence, drug use and increased crime have all been linked to behavioural
difficulties very early in life. One approach is to deal with the problems as
they emerge through counselling, drug treatment, or psychiatry. But this is
expensive, and not always effective. PhysOrg, February 1, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news121070647.html

Researchers studying brain injury believe they've
found a common thread running through many cases of seemingly unrelated
social problems: a long-forgotten blow to the head.

They've found that providing therapy for an
underlying brain injury often helps people with a variety of ills ranging
from learning disabilities to chronic homelessness and alcoholism. If
broadly verified, the findings could have a significant impact in dealing
with such intractable difficulties.

That severe head injuries can lead to cognitive and
behavioral problems is widely accepted. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention estimates 5.3 million Americans suffer from mental or
physical disability that is due to brain injury.

What's new is the contention of some researchers
that there are many other cases where a severe past blow to the head,
resulting in unconsciousness or confusion, is the unrecognized source of
such problems. "Unidentified traumatic brain injury is an unrecognized major
source of social and vocational failure," says Wayne A. Gordon, director of
the Brain Injury Research Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New
York, where much of the research is being done.

Research by his team has consistently found high
rates of "hidden" head trauma when screening various populations in New York
schools, addiction programs and the general population. The CDC acknowledges
its 5.3 million estimate is an undercount based on hospital admissions; it
doesn't include people who sought no treatment for a severe blow to the head
or who were sent home from a doctor's office or emergency room with little
treatment.

Causes of brain injury can include bike and car
accidents, sports concussions such as those suffered by professional
football players, and abuse and falls that can date back to childhood.
Doctors say about 85% of common falls in infancy don't produce long-term
deficits, but that some do.

To be sure, it's difficult to connect with any
certainty a long-ago blow to the head to memory and cognition problems years
later. Other researchers point out that many people do recover completely
from severe head injury, and mental problems arise from other causes.
Moreover, Mount Sinai's findings haven't all been published, nor have they
been widely evaluated at other institutions.

Lost Ability to Read

Mount Sinai's research involves people like Kate
Gleason, a business-college instructor who over the course of a year lost
her ability to read, keep her home orderly and even maintain friendships.

Continued in article

TV for the Visually Impaired Using a new algorithm, researchers are trying to
enhance picture quality so that those with macular degeneration can enjoy
television. Enjoying a favorite TV show can be difficult for someone with
macular degeneration. Like many kinds of visual impairment, macular degeneration
makes the images on the screen seem blurred and distorted. The finer details are
often lost. Now researchers at the Schepens Eye Research Institute have
developed software that lets users manipulate the contrast to create specially
enhanced images for those with macular degeneration. "Our approach was to
implement an image-processing algorithm to the receiving television's decoder,"
says Eli Peli, a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and the
project leader. "The algorithm makes it possible to increase the contrast of
specific size details."
Brittany Sauser, MIT's Technology Review, January 28, 2008 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20117/?nlid=836&a=f

Cold Meds Send 7,000 Kids to Hospitals Cough and cold medicines send about 7,000 children to
hospital emergency rooms each year, the U.S. government said Monday in its first
national estimate of the problem. About two-thirds of the cases were children
who took the medicines unsupervised. However, about one-quarter involved cases
in which parents gave the proper dosage and an allergic reaction or some other
problem developed, the study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention reported. The study included both over-the-counter and prescription
medicines. It comes less than two weeks after the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration warned parents that over-the-counter cough and cold medicines are
too dangerous for children younger than 2. The study's findings about the
proportion of properly dosed kids who end up in the ER is likely to contribute
to FDA discussions about recommendations of cough and cold medicines in the
2-to-6 age group, CDC officials said.
Mike Stobbe, PhysOrg, January 29, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news120806398.html

Roseanne
Barr is Vindicated: Research suggests why scratching is so relieving In the first study to use imaging technology to see
what goes on in the brain when we scratch, researchers at Wake Forest University
Baptist Medical Center have uncovered new clues about why scratching may be so
relieving – and why it can be hard to stop. The work is reported online in the
Journal of Investigative Dermatology and will appear in a future print issue.
“Our study shows for the first time how scratching may relieve itch,” said lead
author Gil Yosipovitch, M.D., a dermatologist who specializes in itch. “It’s
important to understand the mechanism of relief so we can develop more effective
treatments. For some people, itch is a chronic condition that affects overall
health.” The study involved 13 healthy participants who underwent testing with
functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology that highlights areas of
the brain activated during an activity. Participants were scratched on the lower
leg with a small brush. The scratching went on for 30 seconds and was then
stopped for 30 seconds – for a total of about five minutes. “To our surprise, we
found that areas of the brain associated with unpleasant or aversive emotions
and memories became significantly less active during the scratching,” said
Yosipovitch. “We know scratching is pleasurable, but we haven’t known why. It’s
possible that scratching may suppress the emotional components of itch and bring
about its relief.” PhysOrg, January 31, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news121005953.html

Mental health screenings, risk behavior interventions needed in juvenile
justice system Kids who have been arrested and are depressed are more
likely to use drugs and alcohol and engage in unsafe sexual activity that puts
them at greater risk for HIV, according to new research from the Bradley Hasbro
Children’s Research Center. Findings of the study, published in the January
issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, suggest the need for
depression screenings as part of the juvenile intake process in order to
determine appropriate mental health, substance use and HIV risk behavior
interventions. “We know that symptoms of depression may be a factor that is
linked to both drug and alcohol use and sexual risk-taking behaviors,” said lead
author Marina Tolou-Shams, Ph.D., of the Bradley Hasbro Children’s Research
Center and an assistant research professor of psychiatry at The Warren Alpert
Medical School of Brown University. “However, juvenile offenders aren’t
routinely screened for emotional difficulties, such as depression or anxiety –
rather, everyone tends to focus more on their conduct or behavioral problems.”
She said that understanding more about the association between depression and
risky behaviors can help create protocols for appropriately screening, assessing
and identifying the needs of juvenile offenders and lead to positive health
outcomes.PhysOrg, January 28, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news120746368.html

Yale Lecturer Advises:
Flush the Prozac and Hack Your Own HappinessSometime in the 1990s, the
concept of better living through chemistry turned a
corner, thanks to drug companies' efforts to synthesize
antidotes for every possible mood swing. So writes Yale
lecturer Charles Barber in his new book,
Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation.
An OCD sufferer himself, Barber spent a decade working
in places like New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He
knew something was wrong when he discovered that his
colleagues' perfectly functional, $300-an-hour Upper
West Side clients were taking the same potent pills as
his own schizoid, homeless, crackhead patients. "I would
spend part of the day in shelters dealing with seriously
ill people," Barber says. "Then I'd go to cocktail
parties and find out that the people there were on the
same medications." He proposes that we just say no to
multinational drug peddlers and heal ourselves with
cognitive and dialectical behavioral therapies — "talk
therapy" techniques that minimize pill pushing, dispense
with Freudian dream analysis, and engage patients in
actively reprogramming their own brains. It's like "a
highly selective carpentry of the soul," Barber writes —
therapy as self-engineering.
Josh McHugh, Wired Magazine, January 28, 2008 ---
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-02/pl_print

Morphine dependency blocked by single genetic change Morphine’s serious side effect as a pain killer – its
potential to create dependency – has been almost completely eliminated in
research with mice by genetically modifying a single trait on the surface of
neurons. The study scientists think a drug can be developed to similarly block
dependency. PhysOrg, January 28, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news120756505.html

The research was published online January 17 by
“Current Biology” and appears in the journal’s January 23 print edition. The
scientists were led by Jennifer Whistler, PhD, an investigator in the
UCSF-affiliated Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center, and associate
professor of neurology at UCSF.

Millions of people in the U.S. are given the opiate
drug morphine for extreme pain caused by cancer, surgery, nerve damage and
other conditions. It remains the pain killer of choice for many types of
short-term pain, such as surgery, according to Whistler, but it is less
useful for the treatment of chronic pain because its effectiveness decreases
with continued use in a process called tolerance. As a consequence, an
increasingly larger dose is required to treat the pain, thereby increasing
the chance of addiction.

The body’s natural pain killers, such as
endorphins, ease pain by first binding to receptors on the surface of
neurons. The receptors cycle on and off “like a light switch,” Whistler
says, regulating the intake of endorphin. This crucial control is absent
when the neurons encounter morphine. The researchers’ strategy in their
study was to try to trick neurons into responding to morphine in the more
regulated way.

Strong evidence suggests that the natural on-off
cycling occurs because the endorphin receptor withdraws from the cell
surface, toward the cell’s interior, Whistler says. The migration from the
cell surface is called endocytosis.

When the neuron receptors encounter morphine the
light switch is broken, and the nervous system responds by becoming more
tolerant of the drug, making the recipient more dependent on the drug.

To demonstrate their hunch that morphine’s unwanted
effects were caused by the failure of its receptor to withdraw from the cell
surface, the researchers genetically engineered mice with a single
difference from normal mice: Receptors that encounter morphine in these mice
can undergo endocytosis, as they normally do in the presence of endorphins.
The researchers showed that with this single change, morphine remained an
excellent pain killer without inducing tolerance and dependence.

“As more pain medications are being removed from
the market, new strategies to overcome chronic pain become crucial,”
Whistler says. “If new opiate drugs can be developed with morphine’s pain
killing properties but also with the ability to promote endocytosis, they
could be less likely to cause the serious side effects of tolerance and
dependence.”

The research is the first direct demonstration that
this single cellular change can block the body’s tendency to become tolerant
of the drug, she points out.

Several strategies are now being tested to counter
morphine addiction, Whistler says. These include development of morphine
derivatives such as oxycontin, that are delivered in a time released manner
or only once they have been processed in the digestive system. Other
approaches seek to develop morphine derivatives that target only certain
opioid receptors but not others.

“The most promising aspect of these other
approaches is that they have the potential to prevent or delay dependence
and addiction to morphine, but few of them address the development of
tolerance,” Whistler said.

Source: University of California - San Francisco

Forwarded by Sid and Eileen

Yes indeed we all need a tree...

I hired a plumber to help me restore an old
farmhouse, and after he had just finished a rough first day on the job: a
flat tire made him lose an hour of work, his electric drill quit and his
ancient one ton truck refused to start.

While I drove him home, he sat in stony silence. On
arriving, he invited me in to meet his family. As we walked toward the front
door, he paused briefly at a small tree, touching the tips of the branches
with both hands.

When opening the door he underwent an amazing
transformation.. His face was wreathed in smiles and he hugged his two small
children and gave his wife a kiss.

Afterward he walked me to the car. We passed the
tree and my curiosity got the better of me. I asked him about what I had
seen him do earlier.

"Oh, that's my trouble tree," he replied "I know I
can't help having troubles on the job, but one thing's for sure, those
troubles don't belong in the house with my wife and the children.. So I just
hang them up on the tree every night when I come home and ask God to take
care of them. Then in the morning I pick them up again." "Funny thing is,"
he smiled," when I come out in the morning to pick 'em up, there aren't
nearly as many as I remember hanging up the night before."

Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while
we are here we might as well dance. We all Need a Tree.

"She eats like a bird." Did you ever wonder about that
expression? Birds spend most of their waking moments eating or trying to find
food to eat. They can eat more than their body weight in a week. The expression
would seem more fitting for the fat lady in the circus than a Parisian model.

I don't mind going to work,
But that eight hour wait to go home is a bitch.Maxine's sister

Forwarded by Team Carper

Essential vocabulary additions for the workplace (and elsewhere)!!!

1. BLAMESTORMING : Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was
missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

2. SEAGULL MANAGER : A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on
everything, and then leaves.

3. ASSMOSIS : The process by which some people seem to absorb success and
advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.

4. SALMON DAY : The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream
only to get screwed and die in the end.

5. CUBE FARM : An office filled with cubicles.

6. PRAIRIE DOGGING : When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube
farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

12. IRRITAINMENT : Entertainment and media spectacles that are Annoying but
you find yourself unable to stop watching them.

13. PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE : The fine art of whacking the crap out of an
electronic device to get it to work again. Often feel like doing this to my
computer------

14. ADMINISPHERE : The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above
the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often
profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to
solve.

15. 404 : Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error Message "404
Not Found," meaning that the requested site could not be located.

16. GENERICA: Features of the American landscape t hat are exactly the same
no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.

17. OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that
you've just made a BIG mistake. (Like after hitting send on an email by
mistake).

One day the great philosopher came upon an acquaintance, who ran up to him
excitedly and said, "Socrates, do you know what I just heard about one of your
students...?"

"Wait a moment," Socrates replied. "Before you tell me, I'd like you to pass
a little test. It's called the Test of Three."

"Test of Three?"

"That's correct," Socrates continued.

"Before you talk to me about my student let's take a moment to test what
you're going to say. The first test is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that
what you are about to tell me is true?"

"No," the man replied, "actually I just heard about it."

"All right," said Socrates. "So you don't really know if it's true or not.
Now let's try the second test, the test of Goodness. Is what you are about to
tell me about my student something good?"

"No, on the contrary..."

"So," Socrates continued, "you want to tell me something bad about him even
though you're not certain it's true?"

The man shrugged, a little embarrassed.

Socrates continued, "You may still pass though because there is a third test
- the filter of Usefulness.

Is what you want to tell me about my student going to be useful to me?"

"No, not really..."

"Well," concluded Socrates, "if what you want to tell me is neither True nor
Good nor even Useful, why tell it to me at all?"

The man was defeated and ashamed and said no more.

This is the reason Socrates was a great philosopher and held in such high
esteem. It also explains why Socrates never found out that Plato was banging his
wife.

Jensen Comment
In truth Socrates' wife named
Xanthippe
had a notorious temper and mean disposition. Her name is now synonymous with a
"nagging scolding person, especially a shrewish wife" who would dump a chamber
pot on her husband's/lover's head ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthippe

Forwarded by Bob Every

Bubba went to a psychiatrist. 'I've got problems. Every time I go to bed I
think there's somebody under it. I'm scared. I think I'm going crazy.'

'Just put yourself in my hands for one year,' said the shrink. 'Come talk to
me three times a week, and we should be able to get rid of those fears.'

'How much do you charge?

'Eighty dollars per visit, replied the doctor.'

'I'll sleep on it,' said Bubba.

Six months later the doctor met Bubba on the street. 'Why didn't you ever
come to see me about those fears you were having?' asked the psychiatrist.

'Well Eighty bucks a visit three times a week for a year is an awful lot of
money! A bartender cured me for $10. I was so happy to have saved all that money
that I went and bought me a new pickup!'

'Is that so! And how, may I ask, did a bartender cure you?'

'He told me to cut the legs off the bed! - Ain't nobody under there now !!!'

Forwarded by Moe

RECENT STUDY FOUND OUT
WHICH DAYS MEN PREFER TO HAVE SEX. IT WAS FOUND THAT MEN PREFERRED TO ENGAGE IN
SEXUAL ACTIVITY ON THE DAYS THAT STARTED WITH THE LETTER 'T'.
EXAMPLES
TUESDAY
THURSDAYTODAYTOMORROWTHANKSGIVING THATURDAYTHUNDAY

The word moodle is an acronym for "modular
object-oriented dynamic learning environment", which is quite a mouthful.
The Scout Report stated the following about Moodle 1.7. It is a
tremendously helpful opens-source e-learning platform. With Moodle,
educators can create a wide range of online courses with features that
include forums, quizzes, blogs, wikis, chat rooms, and surveys. On the
Moodle website, visitors can also learn about other features and read about
recent updates to the program. This application is compatible with computers
running Windows 98 and newer or Mac OS X and newer.

AECM (Educators)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc

CPAS-L (Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access.

Yahoo
(Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.